For several months, US researchers have been recording the coughing sounds of thousands of people. These are people affected or not by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and asymptomatic for some. The goal? Detect the virus in the coughs of asymptomatic people to better fight the pandemic.
The issue of asymptomatic people is important. It is indeed very difficult to detect these people showing no symptoms. An article published in the IEEE Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology on September 28, 2020 proposes a new screening solution. According to researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), these people have a distinct cough compared to uncontaminated individuals.
In this project, the researchers used artificial intelligence. Indeed, the human ear is unable to distinguish the cough of an infected person from that of a healthy individual. This AI model is therefore based on cough recordings obtained via the volunteer's smartphone or computer microphone. The model brings together several neural networks (machine learning) that have already proven themselves in the detection of neurobiological diseases according to the authors. However, it can for example detect lung performance as well as muscle breakdown of the vocal cords.
“Speech and cough sounds are both influenced by the vocal cords and surrounding organs. This means that when you speak, part of your conversation is similar to coughing, and vice versa. It also means that things we easily guess from fluent speech, such as the person's gender, native language, or even emotional state, can be detected by coughing by the AI “, says Brian Subirana, co-author of the study.
In order to obtain conclusive results, the scientists integrated tens of thousands of cough samples. They also got phrases for a total of one thousand hours of lyrics. According to the results, the success rate is 98.5% concerning the cough of Covid-19 patients and 100% at the level of that of asymptomatic carriers of the virus.
For researchers, the ultimate goal is to integrate this AI into a free mobile application easy to handle. To do this, governments and health organizations will have to give the green light. The authors envision this innovation as a way to detect asymptomatic people at any time. Above all, they think they can reduce the spread of the pandemic . On the other hand, the researchers indicate that it is necessary for everyone to use it before entering a place open to the public.
