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Progress using COVID-19 patient data to train machine learning models for healthcare

Cambridge University

Following from last week's call for governments to use machine learning and AI techniques to help in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, Professor Mihaela van der Schaar gives an update on a working proof of concept she has built using anonymised data from Public Health England.

One short week ago, I called on governments to use existing data and proven machine learning and AI techniques to help healthcare systems combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

The response was amazing. My team and I received encouragement, ideas, and proposals for collaboration.

We also received, courtesy of Public Health England, a set of (depersonalised) data on existing COVID-19 cases. Along with my team at the Cambridge Centre for AI in Medicine, I’ve spent the last few days training our models on this data. The results so far are extremely encouraging.