Researchers from the pulmonology service of the Hospital del Mar and the hospital of the Mar Research Institute have managed to detect covid and its level of severity from a method as minimally invasive as the analysis of the patient’s cough.
The work, in which the Bioengineering Institute of Catalonia and the Biomedical Research Center on Bioengineering, Biomaterials and Nanomedicine Networks also participate, has been carried out by analyzing the recording, with a smartphone, of the sounds of voluntary coughing in 70 patients with covid in the first 24 hours of arrival at the hospital.
The physicians were able to detect significant differences in frequency between the sounds of these patients and those of people with other respiratory pathologies. Their analyzes allow them to detect by coughing who has covid.
The cough analysis can be used both to detect patients with severe covid early and to monitor the evolution, weighing possible complications, even remotely through future applications that allow coughing to be recorded and filtered by algorithms.
The researchers point out that it will now be necessary to carry out more work with data from more patients and the development of algorithms and artificial intelligence models that can analyze cough efficiently and accurately, as well as tests in real clinical settings to test them. The attending physician of the pneumology service, Oswaldo Antonio Caguana, explained that this method “offers a less intrusive alternative compared to conventional saliva or nasal swab tests, being able to provide early diagnosis and rapid detection of the disease.”
