Tyler Wagner

FNU Shweta, Karthik Murugadoss, Samir Awasthi et al.

Understanding the temporal dynamics of COVID-19 patient phenotypes is necessary to derive fine-grained resolution of pathophysiology. Here we use state-of-the-art deep neural networks over an institution-wide machine intelligence platform for the augmented curation of 15.8 million clinical notes from 30,494 patients subjected to COVID-19 PCR diagnostic testing. By contrasting the Electronic Health Record (EHR)-derived clinical phenotypes of COVID-19-positive (COVIDpos, n=635) versus COVID-19-negative (COVIDneg, n=29,859) patients over each day of the week preceding the PCR testing date, we identify anosmia/dysgeusia (37.4-fold), myalgia/arthralgia (2.6-fold), diarrhea (2.2-fold), fever/chills (2.1-fold), respiratory difficulty (1.9-fold), and cough (1.8-fold) as significantly amplified in COVIDpos over COVIDneg patients. The specific combination of cough and diarrhea has a 3.2-fold amplification in COVIDpos patients during the week prior to PCR testing, and along with anosmia/dysgeusia, constitutes the earliest EHR-derived signature of COVID-19 (4-7 days prior to typical PCR testing date). This study introduces an Augmented Intelligence platform for the real-time synthesis of institutional knowledge captured in EHRs. The platform holds tremendous potential for scaling up curation throughput, with minimal need for retraining underlying neural networks, thus promising EHR-powered early diagnosis for a broad spectrum of diseases.

AJ Venkatakrishnan, Arjun Puranik, Akash Anand et al.

The COVID-19 pandemic demands assimilation of all available biomedical knowledge to decode its mechanisms of pathogenicity and transmission. Despite the recent renaissance in unsupervised neural networks for decoding unstructured natural languages, a platform for the real-time synthesis of the exponentially growing biomedical literature and its comprehensive triangulation with deep omic insights is not available. Here, we present the nferX platform for dynamic inference from over 45 quadrillion possible conceptual associations extracted from unstructured biomedical text, and their triangulation with Single Cell RNA-sequencing based insights from over 25 tissues. Using this platform, we identify intersections between the pathologic manifestations of COVID-19 and the comprehensive expression profile of the SARS-CoV-2 receptor ACE2. We find that tongue keratinocytes and olfactory epithelial cells are likely under-appreciated targets of SARS-CoV-2 infection, correlating with reported loss of sense of taste and smell as early indicators of COVID-19 infection, including in otherwise asymptomatic patients. Airway club cells, ciliated cells and type II pneumocytes in the lung, and enterocytes of the gut also express ACE2. This study demonstrates how a holistic data science platform can leverage unprecedented quantities of structured and unstructured publicly available data to accelerate the generation of impactful biological insights and hypotheses.