danielquinn

But we do know. Thousands of manual, slow tests are being run every day. The idea would be to collect those samples and their results for use in the model.

Hmm. I think I see what you're saying. Presumably if one of the markers you'd want to capture is "presence of antibody for covid-19", and if the device you're using can do that, you wouldn't need ML -- obviously.

But I was thinking a little more macroscopically. We don't have any device that can see antibodies or anything as obvious in real time. Instead, we have to collect samples and test them separately in controlled environments while we look for specific markers we know to be signs of infection.

What ML does well though is see patterns in data we don't. Rather than find specific markers, I was thinking we could feed a series of different values into a model to see if a pattern emerged. We can't observe the virus directly, but we can measure the percentage makeup of different chemicals in someone's breath and see if there's a pattern in those we know to be infected vs those we know aren't -- the training set would be the pile of tests already conducted. Then we can apply that model to new data and test the results.

I'm less concerned about which device would be used (this is just one that came to mind that tries to translate breath into data), and more concerned about whether it was possible to translate breath into data at all.

A breathalyzer might be just as good a comparison and is more reusable: if we can detect & capture breath/spit from enough infected & uninfected, surely a pattern would begin to present itself that could be used to diagnose, no?

Current testing is very specific, yes -- so would this system. But where current tests look for something specific: RNA or specific antibodies, this would simply look for "is this sample sufficiently like an infected case or an uninfected one?" Presumably there's more to what's going on in an infected person's lungs than just the existence of the antibodies. Could not ML help find these patterns and identify them as markers of infection?