Belgian initiative for AI lung scan analysis in fight against COVID-19 goes European

Professor Jef Vandemeulebroucke of ETRO: “What started as a local project is now being rolled out in 800 hospitals in Europe and supported by excellent research centres all over Europe. With icolung, we can detect COVID-19 patients at an early stage and quantify the extent of lung lesions. Meanwhile, we are further improving the AI software to identify lung damage as COVID-19 even more quickly, and to determine the further care path of the patient faster and better through prognostic models.”

icolung free for all hospitals in Europe

icolung was certified in April and is currently being used by over 75 hospitals worldwide and has analysed over 35,000 lung CT scans. The icovid project now builds on the development of icolung and is committed to scaling up, thanks to the commitment of renowned research institutes such as King’s College London, Universitätsklinikum Heidelberg, University of Oxford, Maastricht University and the University and Centre Hospitalier Universitaire of Liège. The partners will also collaborate with The Medical Cloud Company to incorporate other clinical information into the models in addition to CT images.

icovid receives funding for this from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Thanks to this financial support, icolung can be offered free of charge to hospitals across Europe. While vaccination will eventually normalise daily life, the virus will still circulate and other coronaviruses may emerge. In local outbreaks, it will be important to identify COVID-19 patients early.  

Belgian initiative

The icovid project was launched in March 2020 as a Belgian pro deo initiative. icometrix, which specialises in AI solutions for medical images, partnered with UZ Brussel, KU Leuven, VUB and imec to investigate how to deploy lung scans in the COVID pandemic and what AI software would be needed to do so. The AI tool icolung was born.

Prof Johan de Mey, VUB-UZ Brussel: “At the time, there was insufficient testing capacity to quickly test all patients. With icolung, we wanted to use lung scans as a triage tool. By using CT and with the help of the AI analyses, we were able to trace patients with suspicious lung lesions and have them tested as a priority. During the busiest periods, everyone who entered the UZ Brussel as a patient was scanned, also as a means of preventing COVID-19 outbreaks in the hospital.”

Detection of Chronic COVID Syndrome

icovid will continue to respond to the rapidly evolving needs of the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, it is estimated that about 2% of COVID-19 patients have symptoms lasting longer than three months, called Long COVID or Chronic COVID Syndrome (CCS). With the improved software, the consortium will also better predict the long-term effects of COVID-19, which are today still largely unknown. The ability to identify patients who may develop CCS opens up possibilities for hospitals to better adapt care and share the burden.

Dr Dirk Smeets, icovid project coordinator and CTO at icometrix, said: “This project allows us to further demonstrate that AI, and medical technology in general, can add value to clinical decisions and save costs. I strongly believe that icolung will benefit from the advice, clinical expertise, and critical evaluation of the renowned academic centres in our consortium.”

Prof Dr Fergus Gleeson, chief medical officer for the National Consortium of Intelligent Medical Imaging, head of academic radiology at Oxford University and president of the European Society of Thoracic Imaging, said: “A wide adoption of AI-based software for the analysis of chest CT images, like icolung, will help the fight against a pandemic that, unfortunately, we will have to endure for quite some time. These large-scale research collaborations with a variety of expertise are critical to responding to the evolving needs during this pandemic.”

Contact

Jef Vandemeulebroucke, professor at VUB, researcher connected to imec-ETRO-VUB, workgroup leader for AI development of the icovid project

jefvdmb@etrovub.be

+32 473 52 46 82

Johan de Mey, professor at VUB, head of radiology UZ Brussel

Johan.deMey@uzbrussel.be

+32 477 98 14 70

Boilerplates 

^{UZ Brussel/VUB}

^{The radiology department of UZ Brussel-VUB contributes to the design of AI instruments, clinical tests and their large-scale deployment. https://www.uzbrussel.be/}

^{ETRO, an imec research group at VUB, leads the development of AI instruments. The primary aim of the software is to automatically analyse CT images of COVID-19 lung lesions, and thereby assess the extent of the lesions and the severity of the infection, and predict the patient’s prognosis. ETRO also offers a tool to automatically determine from a scan whether a patient is infected with COVID-19. This is done on the basis of interpretable classification algorithms that allow doctors to see which parts of the lung images contain patterns that may indicate COVID-19. http://www.etrovub.be/}

^icometrix

^{icometrix (Leuven, Belgium; Boston, USA) strives for data-driven insights and personalised patient care, supported by artificial intelligence. icometrix offers a portfolio of AI solutions to assist healthcare with various challenges; icobrain extracts data from brain MRI and CT scans for the radiological reporting and clinical management of neurological disorders such as multiple sclerosis, brain trauma, epilepsy, stroke, dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. icompanion, a digital platform and mobile app, helps people with MS and their care team to monitor clinical symptoms and treatments efficiently and objectively. icolung addresses the COVID-19 pandemic by measuring lung involvement on chest CT. Today, icometrix is internationally active and integrated into more than 100 clinical practices. In addition, icometrix collaborates with healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies on the evaluation of drug research for neurological disorders. https://icovid.ai}

^{contact: Dirk Smeets}

^{King’s College London}

^{King's College London is one of the top 10 UK universities in the world (QS World University Rankings, 2018/19) and among the oldest in England. King’s has more than 31,000 students (including more than 12,800 postgraduates) from some 150 countries worldwide, and some 8,500 staff. King's has an outstanding reputation for world-class teaching and cutting-edge research. In the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF), eighty-four per cent of research at King’s was deemed ‘world-leading’ or ‘internationally excellent’ (3* and 4*). Since our foundation, King’s students and staff have dedicated themselves in the service of society. King’s will continue to focus on world-leading education, research and service, and will have an increasingly proactive role to play in a more interconnected, complex world. Visit our website to find out more about Vision 2029, King’s strategic vision for the next years to 2029, which will be the 200th anniversary of the founding of the university. World-changing ideas. Life-changing impact: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news}

Links

https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/digital-health-technologies-addressing-pandemic

http://thefuturesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Responsible-AI-in-Pandemic-Response.pdf

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.19.20214494v2