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AI-Assisted Risk Assessment for COVID-19

A new AI tool helps assess COVID-19 risk through patient conversations.

Mohammad Amin Roshani, Xiangyu Zhou, Yao Qiang, Srinivasan Suresh, Steve Hicks, Usha Sethuraman, Dongxiao Zhu

― 4 min read


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Table of Contents

Understanding health risks is important for managing diseases like COVID-19. This article talks about a new way to assess the risk of disease using AI that can chat with people. This system helps doctors and patients communicate better without needing complex programming or large amounts of Data.

The Role of AI in Healthcare

AI, especially large language models (LLMs), are becoming more useful in healthcare. These models can handle different types of information, including written text and data from patients. Instead of needing a lot of data for training, they can learn quickly from just a few examples. This is helpful when there isn't much data available.

How This AI System Works

The system we are discussing creates conversations between patients and AI. When someone answers questions about their health, the AI can assess their risk for severe COVID-19. This is done in Real-time, making it easy for patients to get immediate feedback.

Fine-Tuning AI Models

To make the AI work better for this task, we adjust pre-trained models. This process involves giving the AI examples of what to look for in responses. The models are tested against traditional methods, like Logistic Regression and Random Forest, to see how well they perform.

Mobile Application Design

The AI is built into a Mobile App that both patients and healthcare providers can use. Patients can answer questions about their health on the app, and based on their responses, the AI gives a Risk Assessment. Healthcare providers can also access these results to make informed decisions.

Collecting Data

Data for this project was collected from hospitals where children were treated for COVID-19. The severity of the illness was determined based on whether patients needed extra support, like oxygen or ventilation. This information helps the AI understand how to assess risk.

Data Format

The data collected is structured in a way that allows the AI to process it effectively. Each patient response is organized into a binary format (yes/no) that indicates the presence or absence of severe symptoms.

Using AI for Risk Assessment

The AI uses information from patients to assess risk without needing extensive coding or data preparation. By processing responses in real-time, the system can analyze health risks quickly.

Interaction with Patients

When patients use the app, the AI asks them questions about their health. The responses are analyzed immediately to determine if there is a significant risk of COVID-19 severity. This helps in managing treatment and resources more effectively.

Comparing AI with Traditional Methods

Traditional methods of assessing health risks often require large datasets and structured information. In contrast, the AI model shows it can perform well with little data.

Performance in Testing

When compared to traditional methods, the AI outperformed them even when given limited training samples. This highlights the effectiveness of using LLMs in healthcare for assessing risks in real-time.

Key Features of the AI System

Real-Time Analysis

One of the strengths of the AI system is its ability to provide analysis in real time. Patients receive immediate feedback on their health risks, which helps them understand their situation better.

Feature Importance Analysis

The AI goes beyond just giving a risk score. It also explains which factors contributed to the assessment. This feature is beneficial for both patients and clinicians as it provides insight into the decision-making process.

User Experience with the Mobile App

The mobile app is designed for ease of use. Patients can quickly enter their health information, and the AI does the rest. They see their risk assessment, and clinicians can monitor all patients’ assessments in one place.

Database Structure

The app uses a structured database to manage user information and responses. This organization ensures that data is easily accessible and manageable.

Results from Testing the AI System

The AI system was tested across different settings to evaluate its performance. It showed promising results, especially in scenarios with limited data.

Performance Metrics

When evaluated against traditional methods, the AI system not only matched but exceeded performance in many cases, especially in low-data environments.

Future Directions

As technology advances, there is more potential for using generative AI in healthcare. Future systems could involve more continuous data collection, providing even more accurate assessments.

Improving Model Robustness

While the current AI system shows promise, there are still challenges to address. Ensuring that the model remains reliable and accurate, even when faced with adversarial attacks, is crucial for safe healthcare applications.

Conclusion

Generative AI presents a new and effective approach for assessing health risks, especially for diseases like COVID-19. With the ability to analyze patient responses and provide immediate feedback, this technology can enhance communication and decision-making in healthcare. Continuous improvement and further research will help to refine these systems, making them even more valuable in managing health risks.

Original Source

Title: Generative LLM Powered Conversational AI Application for Personalized Risk Assessment: A Case Study in COVID-19

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in various natural language tasks and are increasingly being applied in healthcare domains. This work demonstrates a new LLM-powered disease risk assessment approach via streaming human-AI conversation, eliminating the need for programming required by traditional machine learning approaches. In a COVID-19 severity risk assessment case study, we fine-tune pre-trained generative LLMs (e.g., Llama2-7b and Flan-t5-xl) using a few shots of natural language examples, comparing their performance with traditional classifiers (i.e., Logistic Regression, XGBoost, Random Forest) that are trained de novo using tabular data across various experimental settings. We develop a mobile application that uses these fine-tuned LLMs as its generative AI (GenAI) core to facilitate real-time interaction between clinicians and patients, providing no-code risk assessment through conversational interfaces. This integration not only allows for the use of streaming Questions and Answers (QA) as inputs but also offers personalized feature importance analysis derived from the LLM's attention layers, enhancing the interpretability of risk assessments. By achieving high Area Under the Curve (AUC) scores with a limited number of fine-tuning samples, our results demonstrate the potential of generative LLMs to outperform discriminative classification methods in low-data regimes, highlighting their real-world adaptability and effectiveness. This work aims to fill the existing gap in leveraging generative LLMs for interactive no-code risk assessment and to encourage further research in this emerging field.

Authors: Mohammad Amin Roshani, Xiangyu Zhou, Yao Qiang, Srinivasan Suresh, Steve Hicks, Usha Sethuraman, Dongxiao Zhu

Last Update: 2024-09-23 00:00:00

Language: English

Source URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.15027

Source PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.15027

Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Changes: This summary was created with assistance from AI and may have inaccuracies. For accurate information, please refer to the original source documents linked here.

Thank you to arxiv for use of its open access interoperability.

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