COVID19RISK - INTRODUCTION

In December 2019, a novel coronavirus, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2; earlier named as 2019-nCoV), emerged in Wuhan, China. The disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 was named COVID-19. The outbreak of COVID-19 has developed into a pandemic.

Among COVID-19 patients, around 80% are present with mild illness whose symptoms usually disappear within two weeks. However, around 20% of the patients may develop more severe symptoms necessitating a hospitalization and increased medical support. The mortality rate for this group of patients is around 13.4%. Therefore, risk assessment of patients, preferably in a quantitative, non-subjective way, is extremely important for patient management and medical resource allocation. General quarantine and symptomatic treatment at home can be used for most non-severe patients, while a higher level of care and fast track to the intensive care unit (ICU) is needed for severe patients. Previous studies have summarized the clinical and radiological characteristics of severe COVID-19 patients, while the prognostic value of different variables is still unclear.

Our objective is to develop and validate a diagnostic & prognostic machine-learning model based on clinical, laboratory, genetic and radiological variables of COVID-19 patients at hospital admission for risk assessment during hospitalization. Our ambition is to develop a multifactorial Decision Support Systems with different datasets to facilitate:
- Risk assessment before infection (more strict home quarantine…
- Diagnosis
- Risk assessment and triage (hospitalization, or ICU) of patient at hospital admission.
- Follow-up
- Stratification in trials

The recently founded Department of Precision Medicine of MUMC+ is a disease and discipline-agnostic department with an international group of highly motivated researchers at the University of Maastricht. The Department of Precision Medicine consists of the D-Lab, an AI lab focussed on Decision Support System (DSS) and the M-Lab, a molecular Lab. Since March 2020 the team of the D-Lab has been working 24/7 to develop a AI-based decision support systems for triage of COVID-19. One of the discoveries is the very strong prognostic value of standard blood biomarkers. This has been an international effort with data from China, the Netherlands, Italy and Belgium. The objective is now to continuously retrain the model with new data, including molecular data.

Department of Precision Medicine

The recently founded Department of Precision Medicine of MUMC+ is an disease and discipline-agnostic department with international group of highly motivated researchers at the University of Maastricht. The Department of Precision Medicine consists out of The D-Lab, an AI lab focussed on Decision Support System (DSS) and the M-Lab, a molecular lab. The last month the team of the D-Lab has been working 24/7 to develop a AI-based decision support systems for triage of COVID-19. One of the discovery is the very strong prognostic value of standard blood biomarkers. This has been an international effort with data from China, the Netherlands, Italy and Belgium. The objective is now to continuously retrain the model with new data, including molecular data.

Our key factors

Two research units within the department for Precision Medicine corresponding to two main lines of research: multifactorial Clinical Decision Support Systems and Innovative treatment targeting the tumour microenvironment.