AN Artificial Intelligence (AI) test can quickly screen patients arriving in A&E departments for Covid-19 within one hour.

It uses clinical information routinely available within the first hour of coming to hospital.

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Results of the CURIAL study show that the AI test correctly predicted the Covid-19 status of 92.3 per cent of patients coming to A&E departments at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford and the Horton General Hospital in Banbury during a two-week test period.

The screening test was developed by infectious disease and clinical machine learning experts at the University of Oxford.

Compared against results of laboratory swab testing, the CURIAL AI screening test correctly ruled-out COVID-19 97.6 per cent of the time.

However, whereas swab testing typically takes 24 hours, the AI screening test offers rapid results using data that is already routinely available within one hour.

The research team is led by Dr Andrew Soltan, an NIHR Academic Clinical Fellow (Cardiology) at the John Radcliffe Hospital, joining with the AI for Healthcare lab of Professor David Clifton, within Oxford’s Institute of Biomedical Engineering, and with Professor David Eyre of the Oxford Big Data Institute.

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Dr Soltan, also a researcher at Oxford University’s Radcliffe Department of Medicine, said: "Every day around 350 people come to our Emergency Departments in the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford and the Horton General Hospital in Banbury, yet only a small number will be ill with Covid-19.

"The CURIAL AI test offers clinical teams the potential to rapidly and confidently rule-out a diagnosis of Covid-19 for a large majority of the patients who do not have the infection, while identifying patients at higher risk of testing positive. The higher-risk patients can then be cared for in clinical areas with additional infection-control precautions while swab test results are awaited."