Close
ADAPTS (Artificial intelligence Diagnostic And Prognostic Tools for Sonography) enables health care professionals undertake lung ultrasound scans & diagnose Covid-19 in real-time & decrease mortality.
Project Summary
SARS-CoV-2 is devastating indigenous populations particularly in the Amazonian city of Iquitos in Peru. Very few health centres have access to molecular diagnostic polymerase chain reaction (PCR) or radiological testing capable of distinguishing Covid-19.
Lung ultrasound (LUS) at the point-of-care (POCUS) can now provide real time diagnosis of Covid-19 pneumonia while being sustainable, cost-effective, safe, easy to clean and suitable for use in remote communities.
We have developed ADAPTS (Artificial intelligence Diagnostic And Prognostic Tools for Sonography) that enables any health care professional to undertake LUS scans and diagnose Covid-19 in real-time and decrease mortality (Baum et al., 2021)
The objective of this project is to introduce Point-of-Care Ultrasound to improve Covid-19 diagnosis in the remote region of Loreto in Peru. In collaboration with the Peruvian Ministry of Health we will implement a clinical screening questionnaire together with portable oxygen saturation monitoring and ultrasound to identify cases with Covid-19 pneumonia in the health posts necessitating referral to the Hospital Regional de Belen. This will be compared to referrals made to the hospital under the current standard of care.
Recruitment will take place in the health posts over 12 weeks with the aim of recruiting 150 participants with suspected Covid-19. A case-control methodology will be implemented to allow comparisons with the standard of care at the health posts that have not yet implemented POCUS ADAPTS.
We hypothesize that our clinical screening questionnaire and ADAPTS with portable POCUS devices will significantly improve the specificity of Covid-19 referrals, decreasing timing of diagnosis and appropriate treatment when compared to the standard of care.
This study will open the possibility for expanding the programme to other health posts in Peru and in other Low-Middle Income Countries.