Researchers in Oman develop AI-based symptom checker to aid telemedicine
As the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, new research to offset the repercussions of the disease are also increasing.
Researchers in Oman have developed a clinical decision support system (CDSS) for the provision of telemedicine in primary health centres and satellite clinics of Royal Oman Police (ROP) hospitals to support coronavirus patients.
They also developed an artificial intelligence-based symptom checker, which can be used by any citizen from home based on their current symptoms, a statement from The Research Council (TRC) under the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation (MoHERI), said.
The COVID-19 Research Programme of MoHERI has showcased many research projects on the coronavirus pandemic.
The latest one is ‘Using clinical ontologies to build a knowledgebased CDSS for the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) with the adoption of teleconferencing for the primary health centres’ by co-principal investigator Dr Sherimon P C from Arab Open University, the statement added.
Dr Sherimon and his research team used ontology to represent the clinical protocol available to combat COVID-19. Ontology includes concepts related to medical knowledge, and attributes and semantic relationships between these concepts.
They also established their own WebRTC based telemedicine application, which is integrated into the CDSS. They tested the system with sample data, and it was found that the system provides the recommendations and medications similar to the doctors.
While the medical domain has a lot of expert systems to assist health practitioners in diagnosing various diseases, Dr Sherimon said that the proposed CDSS for this project is different as it involves artificial intelligence.
“Initially, the CDSS conducts diagnosis to detect the symptoms of coronavirus. It will also consider and evaluate the medical history and other medical issues or complications of the suspected patient.”