COVID-19 mortality prediction using deep neural networks

Abstract

COVID - 19 disease caused by the virus SARS-CoV2 appeared in Wuhan China in 2019, in March 11th 2020 it was declared a global pandemics, taking by March 2022 over 5,783,700 lives around the world. COVID-19 spreads in several different ways, the virus SARS-CoV2 which causes COVID-19 can spread from a mouth or nose of a person who is infected through liquid particles whenever they cough, sneeze, speak or breath. Initial symptoms and development of the illness are catalogued as mild, because of that it may be difficult to identify which persons will more probably develop severe disease. One great support that can be given to medical centers and healthcare workforce would be the ability to predict which patients will have a greater risk of death and would develop more quickly and severe illness, in order to make triage for treatment and decisions about resources distribution. Machine learning and specifically Deep Learning works by modelling hierarchical representations behind data, aiming to classify or predict patterns by stacking multiple layers of information. Some of its main applications are speech recognition, natural language processing, audio recognition, autonomous vehicles and even medicine. In medicine, it has been used to predict how a disease develops and affects patients. During this thesis it was done a research and comparison of state of the art articles and models that aim to predict the behavior and development of COVID-19 patients and the illness itself. Their different datasets, metrics, models and results have been studied and used as a base in order to create the proposed models of the thesis. This research project proposes the use of machine learning models to predict the mortality of COVID-19 patients by using as input attributes of the patients such as vital signs, biomarkers, comorbidities and diagnostics. This data was obtained for training and testing purposes from different medical centers, such as HM Hospitals, San Jose Hospital and CEM Hospital. The main Deep Learning model used during this thesis is a Deep Multi-layer Perceptron Neural Network which uses static attributes, and a Long-Short Term Memory Recurrent Neural Network using dynamic attributes. A mixed model combining the static and dynamic model was also created. It was also used metrics that support the reduction of false negative cases, the Maximum Probability of Correct Decision is the main metric to evaluate and optimize the model. The models have been evaluated and compared with another machine learning models such as Random Forest and eXtreme Gradient Boosting over the different datasets.