Predicting the disease outcome in COVID-19 positive patients through Machine Learning: a retrospective cohort study with Brazilian data

The first officially registered case of COVID-19 in Brazil was on February 26, 2020. Since then, the situation has worsened with more than 672, 000 confirmed cases and at least 36, 000 reported deaths at the time of this writing. Accurate diagnosis of patients with COVID-19 is extremely important to offer adequate treatment, and avoid overloading the healthcare system. Characteristics of patients such as age, comorbidities and varied clinical symptoms can help in classifying the level of infection severity, predict the disease outcome and the need for hospitalization. Here, we present a study to predict a poor prognosis in positive COVID-19 patients and possible outcomes using machine learning. The study dataset comprises information of 13, 690 patients concerning closed cases due to cure or death. Our experimental results show the disease outcome can be predicted with a ROC AUC of 0.92, Sensitivity of 0.88 and Specificity of 0.82 for the best prediction model. This is a preliminary retrospective study which can be improved with the inclusion of further data. Conclusion: Machine learning techniques fed with demographic and clinical data along with comorbidities of the patients can assist in the prognostic prediction and physician decision-making, allowing a faster response and contributing to the non-overload of healthcare systems.