Rapid Classification of COVID-19 Severity by ATR-FTIR Spectroscopy of Plasma Samples

Banerjee, Arghya; Gokhale, Abhiram; Bankar, Renuka; Palanivel, Viswanthram; Salkar, Akanksha; Robinson, Harley; Shastri, Jayanthi S.; Agrawal, Sachee; Hartel, Gunter; Hill, Michelle M.; Srivastava, Sanjeeva

[Image: see text] The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic continues to ravage the world, with many hospitals overwhelmed by the large number of patients presenting during major outbreaks. A rapid triage for COVID-19 patient requiring hospitalization and intensive care is urgently needed. Age and comorbidities have been associated with a higher risk of severe COVID-19 but are not sufficient to triage patients. Here, we investigated the potential of attenuated total reflectance Fourier-transform infrared (ATR-FTIR) spectroscopy as a rapid blood test for classification of COVID-19 disease severity using a cohort of 160 COVID-19 patients. A simple plasma processing and ATR-FTIR data acquisition procedure was established using 75% ethanol for viral inactivation. Next, partial least-squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) models were developed and tested using data from 130 and 30 patients, respectively. Addition of the ATR-FTIR spectra to the clinical parameters (age, sex, diabetes mellitus, and hypertension) increased the area under the ROC curve (C-statistics) for both the training and test data sets, from 69.3% (95% CI 59.8–78.9%) to 85.7% (78.6–92.8%) and 77.8% (61.3–94.4%) to 85.1% (71.3–98.8%), respectively. The independent test set achieved 69.2% specificity (42.4–87.3%) and 94.1% sensitivity (73.0–99.0%). Diabetes mellitus was the strongest predictor in the model, followed by FTIR regions 1020–1090 and 1588–1592 cm(–1). In summary, this study demonstrates the potential of ATR-FTIR spectroscopy as a rapid, low-cost COVID-19 severity triage tool to facilitate COVID-19 patient management during an outbreak.