Artificial Intelligence Arrives in Long COVID Diagnostic and Treatment Fight

Credit: Photo by cottonbro studio

As healthcare systems continue to grapple with identifying and managing long COVID, artificial intelligence (AI) is showing promise as an important tool that could one day expand scientists’ understanding and even lead to new diagnostics for the condition. 

Three recent studies demonstrated how machine learning and AI algorithms can be leveraged to process vast amounts of complex clinical notes, hospital data, and patient data. All three highlighted how AI could potentially tackle different aspects of long COVID and advance how clinicians identify, track, predict, and treat it.

Because of the way the SARS-CoV-2 virus binds to human cells, long COVID complications can develop almost anywhere, experts said — from the brain to the heart to the gastrointestinal system — causing upwards of more than 200 symptoms. Many of these symptoms can also be caused by other diseases and conditions, making diagnosis and treatment challenging.

“That’s hard from a medical point of view, because that’s not typical of how we think of most illnesses that we deal with,” said Fahad Razak, MD, internist at St. Michael’s Hospital and Canada Research Chair in Healthcare Data and Analytics at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

“Probably all of our data underestimates the real population-level burden of how many people are affected by [long COVID], and I think many people suffer in silence,” he said. Read more here.