Report on Three Round COVID-19 Risk Blind Tests by Screening Eye-region Manifestations

Abstract

The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has affected several million people since 2019. Despite various vaccines of COVID-19 protect million people in many countries, the worldwide situations of more the asymptomatic and mutated strain discovered are urging the more sensitive COVID-19 testing in this turnaround time. Unfortunately, it is still nontrivial to develop a new fast COVID-19 screening method with the easier access and lower cost, due to the technical and cost limitations of the current testing methods in the medical resource-poor districts. On the other hand, there are more and more ocular manifestations that have been reported in the COVID-19 patients as growing clinical evidence[1]. This inspired this project. We have conducted the joint clinical research since January 2021 at the ShiJiaZhuang City, Heibei province, China, which approved by the ethics committee of The fifth hospital of ShiJiaZhuang of Hebei Medical University. We undertake several blind tests of COVID-19 patients by Union Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China. Meantime as an important part of the ongoing globally COVID-19 eye test program by AIMOMICS since February 2020, we propose a new fast screening method of analyzing the eye-region images, captured by common CCD and CMOS cameras. This could reliably make a rapid risk screening of COVID-19 with the sustainable stable high performance in different countries and races. For this clinical trial in ShiJiaZhuang, we compare and analyze 1194 eye-region images of 115 patients, including 66 COVID-19 positive patients, 44 rehabilitation patients (nucleic acid changed from positive to negative), 5 liver patients, as well as 117 healthy people. Remarkably, we consistently achieved very high testing results (> 0.94) in terms of both sensitivity and specificity in our blind test of COVID-19 patients. This confirms the viability of the COVID-19 fast screening by the eye-region manifestations. Particularly and impressively, the results have the similar conclusion as the other clinical trials of the globally COVID-19 eye test program[1]. Hopefully, this series of ongoing globally COVID-19 eye test study, and potential rapid solution of fully self-performed COVID risk screening method, can be inspiring and helpful to more researchers in the world soon. Our model for COVID-19 rapid prescreening have the merits of the lower cost, fully self-performed, non-invasive, importantly real-time, and thus enables the continuous health surveillance. We further implement it as the open accessible APIs, and provide public service to the world. Our pilot experiments show that our model is ready to be usable to all kinds of surveillance scenarios, such as infrared temperature measurement device at airports and stations, or directly pushing to the target people groups smartphones as a packaged application.