A Digital Health System for Disease Analytics

Abstract

Data science, data mining and machine learning have been applied in numerous real-life applications and services including disease and healthcare analytics, such as identification and predictive analytics of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Many of these existing works usually require large volumes of data train the classification and prediction models. However, these data (e.g., computed tomography (CT) scan images, viral/molecular test results) that can be expensive to produce and/or not easily accessible. For instance, partially due to privacy concerns and other factors, the volume of available disease data can be limited. Hence, in this paper, we present a digital health system for disease analytics. Specifically, the system make good use of autoencoder and few-shot learning to train the prediction model with only a few samples of more accessible and less expensive types of data (e.g., serology/antibody test results from blood samples), which helps to support prediction on classification of potential patients (e.g., potential COVID-19 patients). Moreover, the system also provides users (e.g., healthcare providers) with interpretable explanation of the prediction results, which increases their trust in the system. With this system, users could then focus and provide timely treatment to the true patients, thus preventing them for spreading the disease in the community. The system is helpful, especially for rural areas, when sophisticated equipment (e.g., CT scanners) may be unavailable. Evaluation results on a real-life datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our digital health system in disease analytics, especially in classifying and explaining crucial information about patients.