Development of Risk-Free COVID-19 Screening Algorithm from Routine Blood Test using Ensemble Machine Learning

Raihan, Md. Mohsin Sarker; Khan, Md. Mohi Uddin; Akter, Laboni; Shams, Abdullah Bin

The Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RTPCR) test is the silver bullet diagnostic test to discern COVID infection. Rapid antigen detection is a screening test to identify COVID positive patients in little as 15 minutes, but has a lower sensitivity than the PCR tests. Besides having multiple standardized test kits, many people are getting infected&either recovering or dying even before the test due to the shortage and cost of kits, lack of indispensable specialists and labs, time-consuming result compared to bulk population especially in developing and underdeveloped countries. Intrigued by the parametric deviations in immunological&hematological profile of a COVID patient, this research work leveraged the concept of COVID-19 detection by proposing a risk-free and highly accurate Stacked Ensemble Machine Learning model to identify a COVID patient from communally available-widespread-cheap routine blood tests which gives a promising accuracy, precision, recall&F1-score of 100%. Analysis from R-curve also shows the preciseness of the risk-free model to be implemented. The proposed method has the potential for large scale ubiquitous low-cost screening application. This can add an extra layer of protection in keeping the number of infected cases to a minimum and control the pandemic by identifying asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic people early.