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COVID-19 Clinical Status Associated With Outcome Severity: An Unsupervised Machine Learning Approach

NCT05119465 · Status: COMPLETED · Type: OBSERVATIONAL · Enrollment: 268

Last updated 2023-05-16

No results posted yet for this study

Summary

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, 195 million people have been infected and 4.2 million have died from the disease or its side-effects. Physicians, healthcare scientists and medical staff continuously try to deal with overloaded hospital admissions, while in parallel, they try to identify meaningful correlations between the severity of infected patients with their symptoms, comorbidities and biomarkers. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have been used recently in many areas related to COVID-19 healthcare. The main goal is to manage effectively the wide variety of issues related to COVID-19 and its consequences. The existing applications of ML to COVID-19 healthcare are based on supervised classification which require a labeled training dataset, serving as reference point for learning, as well as predefined classes. However, the existing knowledge about COVID-19 and its consequences is still not solid and the points of common agreement among different scientific communities are still unclear.

Therefore, this study aimed to follow an unsupervised clustering approach, where prior knowledge is not required (tabula rasa).

More specifically, 268 hospitalized patients at the First Propaedeutic Department of Internal Medicine of AHEPA University Hospital of Thessaloniki were assessed in terms of 40 clinical variables (numerical and categorical), leading to a high-dimensionality dataset. Dimensionality reduction was performed by applying Principal Component Analysis (PCA) on the numerical part of the dataset and Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) on the categorical part of the dataset. Then, the Bayesian Information Criterion(BIC) was applied to Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) in order to identify the optimal number of clusters, under which, the best grouping of patients occurs.

The proposed methodology identified 4 clusters of patients with similar clinical characteristics. The analysis revealed a cluster of asymptomatic patients that resulted in death at a rate of 23.8%.

This striking result forces us to reconsider the relationship between the severity of COVID-19 clinical symptoms and patient's mortality.

Conditions

Sponsors & Collaborators

  • Aristotle University Of Thessaloniki

    lead OTHER

Eligibility

Sex
ALL
Healthy Volunteers
No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start
2019-11-01
Primary Completion
2021-06-30
Completion
2021-06-30

Countries

  • Greece

Study Locations

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Entities

Diseases

Read the full study record

This page highlights key information. For complete eligibility criteria, study locations, investigator contacts, and the full protocol, visit the original record on ClinicalTrials.gov.

View NCT05119465 on ClinicalTrials.gov