COVID-19 AI Predictive Testing Comes A Step Closer

Bengaluru: Neura, a Palo Alto, CA, global leader in AI-powered behavioral intelligence providing real-world insights for health organizations, governments, and consumer brands has announced the adoption of ViruScore COVID-19 predictive-testing solution.

Neura’s Human Behavioral Intelligence Platform is the first-ever AI-based approach to be utilized in the field, with HY Laboratories, the main provider of COVID-19 tests solutions in Israel, and one of the world’s top 5 HMOs using it to grade testing samples to enable more efficient test pooling.

Neura transforms vast amounts of anonymized sensory data from millions of mobile devices using AI and machine learning, into actionable insights such as Social Distancing Index, Human Encounter Rate, crowd-gathering patterns and Super-Spreader mobility patterns.

These actionable insights are subsequently utilized by health organizations, municipalities, and governments to predict and contain the spread of COVID-19. As part of Neura’s newest offering, these same COVID-19 insights are fused with pandemic data to create a risk score.

The score is employed by HMOs and labs to grade the probability of a positive or negative result on a four level scale ranging from “highest probability” to “lowest probability.

In Neura’s study with HY Laboratories, the Neura ViruScore™ solution achieved 98% accuracy in test prediction across a sample size of 1,000 tests. As a result, Neura was able to create a population sample with 2% positive infection rate, producing an optimal environment for pool testing and enabling the HMO to increase capacity by 6X.

Three out of four models did not assign batches with even a single positive test to its lowest probability classification and the fourth assigned only a single positive test.

Those results point to Neura’s human behavior driven based testing approach playing a pivotal role in breaking infectious chains faster, and potentially saving millions of dollars by reducing the number of tests required.

“Neura’s solution is a significant leap forward for the deployment of behavioural-intelligence tech in the fight against COVID-19” said Neura’s CEO, Amit Hammer.

“Being able to identify high and low risk groups, future outbreaks and behavioural super spreaders is crucial to government efforts to fight the virus. With the recent FDA approval of COVID-19 test pooling, Neuara’s insights will go even further in helping to slow and break down the chain of infection.”

“As of today, we do not look only at the analytical and clinical utility of testing, but at the entire workflow and its implications on a much broader scale. Neura brings an out of the box approach and new possibilities for sample managing, achieving a powerful enhancement of the test pooling process,” added Tsofnat Cohen Lubetzky, Head of Business Development at Hylabs.

This article first appeared in NFA Post and is republished here with permission.