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In a paper published recently in the IEEE Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology, the team reports on an AI model that distinguishes asymptomatic people from healthy individuals through forced-cough recordings, which people voluntarily submitted through web browsers and devices such as cellphones and laptops.

When they fed the model new cough recordings, it accurately identified 98.5 percent of coughs from people who were confirmed to have Covid-19, including 100 percent of coughs from asymptomatic — who reported they did not have symptoms but had tested positive for the virus.

The team is working on incorporating the model into a user-friendly app, which if FDA-approved and adopted on a large scale could potentially be a free, convenient, noninvasive prescreening tool to identify people who are likely to be asymptomatic for Covid-19.

To date, the researchers have collected more than 70,000 recordings, each containing several coughs, amounting to some 200,000 forced-cough audio samples, which Subirana says is “the largest research cough dataset that we know of.”

Around 2,500 recordings were submitted by people who were confirmed to have Covid-19, including those who were asymptomatic. Without much tweaking within the AI framework originally meant for Alzheimer’s, they found it was able to pick up patterns in the four biomarkers — vocal cord strength, sentiment, lung and respiratory performance, and muscular degradation — that are specific to Covid-19.

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