Mayo Clinic in Yet Another Collaboration Using AI to Fight COVID-19

This time Mayo Clinic is teaming up with Ultromics to map how COVID-19 virus attacks the heart.

Mayo Clinic and Ultromics are employing artificial intelligence to help rapidly assess patients diagnosed with the novel coronavirus (COVID-19).

Under the collaboration, the two will use EchoGo Core, to analyze echocardiograms of COVID-19 victims, to map for the first time how COVID-19 virus attacks the heart with such deadly impact. The multi-site study will look at 500 COVID-19 positive men and women, aged between 18 and 89. These participants will have undergone a clinically indicated echocardiography exam during a three-month period.

The primary objective is the assessment of automated cardiac measurements, ejection fraction, and Global Longitudinal Strain, for the classification of COVID-19 patient outcomes.

Mayo Clinic and Ultromics said the findings will produce, for the first time, a map of the ‘novel cardiac features’ of COVID-19 and help physicians rapidly triage and treat high-risk patients, potentially saving countless lives.

In a release, Ultromics's CEO, Ross Upton said: “To date, there is no way of linking the impact of the virus to predicted patient outcomes. By applying our technology to the evaluation of COVID associated echocardiograms, we can help understand the characteristics of cardiac involvement. We hope that by discovering a way to do this, patient management can be optimized – this is incredibly important where resources are scarce. Most importantly, we can give physicians the gift of time to treat those most in danger.”

This isn’t the first time Mayo Clinic has employed an AI-based solution to help tackle COVID-19. Late last month, Mayo Clinic teamed up with Current Health to develop monitoring solutions that accelerate the identification of COVID-19 patients and predict symptom and disease severity.

The collaboration is aimed at accelerating the identification of COVID-19-positive patients and predict symptom and disease severity in patients, healthcare workers, and other at-risk individuals in critical service sectors. To do this, digital biomarkers collected by Current Health’s FDA-cleared remote monitoring sensors and platform will be used.