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Background Many different treatments were heavily administered to patients with COVID-19 during the peak of the pandemic in Madrid without robust evidence supporting them. Methods We examined the association between sixteen treatments in four groups (steroids, antivirals, antibiotics and immunomodulators) and intubation or death. Data were obtained from patients that were admitted to an HM hospital with suspicion of COVID-19 until 24/04/2020, excluding unconfirmed diagnosis, those who were admitted before the epidemic started in Madrid, had an outcome that was not discharge or death or died within 24 hours of presentation. We compared outcomes between treated and untreated patients using propensity-score caliper matching. Results Of 2,307 patients in the dataset, 679 were excluded. Of the remaining 1,645 patients, 263 (16%) died and 311 (18.9%) died or were intubated. Except for hydroxychloroquine and prednisone, patients that were treated with any of the medications were more likely to go through an outcome of death or intubation at baseline. After propensity matching we found an association between treatment with hydroxychloroquine and prednisone and better outcomes (hazard ratios with 95% CI of 0.83 +- 0.06 and 0.85 +- 0.03). Results were similar in multiple sensitivity analyses. Conclusions In this multicenter study of patients admitted with COVID-19 hydroxychloroquine and prednisone administration was found to be associated with improved outcomes. Other treatments were associated with no effect or worse outcomes. Randomized, controlled trials of these medications in patients with COVID-19 are needed to avoid heavy administration of treatments with no strong evidence to support them.

We present FGES-Merge, a new method for learning the structure of gene regulatory networks via merging locally learned Bayesian networks, based on the fast greedy equivalent search algorithm. The method is competitive with the state of the art in terms of the recall of the true structure while also improving upon it in terms of speed, scaling up to the tens of thousands of variables and being able to use empirical knowledge about the topological structure of gene regulatory networks. We apply this method to learning the gene regulatory network for the full human genome using data from samples of different brain structures (from the Allen Human Brain Atlas). Our goal is to develop a Bayesian network model that predicts interactions between genes in a way that is clear to experts, following the current trends in interpretable artificial intelligence. To achieve this, we also present a new open-access visualization tool that facilitates the exploration of massive networks and can aid in finding nodes of interest for experimental tests.

ObjectivesTo present a model that enhances the accuracy of clinicians when presented with a possibly critical Covid-19 patient.MethodsA retrospective study was performed with information of 5,745 SARS-CoV2 infected patients admitted to the Emergency room of 4 public Hospitals in Madrid belonging to Quirón Salud Health Group (QS) from March 2020 to February 2021. Demographics, clinical variables on admission, laboratory markers and therapeutic interventions were extracted from Electronic Clinical Records. Traits related to mortality were found through difference in means testing and through feature selection by learning multiple classification trees with random initialization and selecting the ones that were used the most. We validated the model through cross-validation and tested generalization with an external dataset from 4 hospitals belonging to Sanitas Hospitals Health Group. The usefulness of two different models in real cases was tested by measuring the effect of exposure to the model decision on the accuracy of medical professionals.ResultsOf the 5,745 admitted patients, 1,173 died. Of the 110 variables in the dataset, 34 were found to be related with our definition of criticality (death in <72 hours) or all-cause mortality. The models had an accuracy of 85% and a sensitivity of 50% averaged through 5-fold cross validation. Similar results were found when validating with data from the 4 hospitals from Sanitas. The models were found to have 11% better accuracy than doctors at classifying critical cases and improved accuracy of doctors by 12% for non-critical patients, reducing the cost of mistakes made by 17%.

The response to the ongoing second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic can be helped by giving medical professionals access to models learned on patient data. To achieve this, we learned a Bayesian network model to predict risk of ICU admission, death and time of stay in the hospital from patient history, initial vital signs, initial laboratory tests and medication. Data were obtained from patients that were admitted to an HM hospital with suspicion of COVID-19 until 24/04/2020, excluding unconfirmed diagnosis, those who were admitted before the epidemic started in Madrid, had an outcome that was not discharge or death or died within 24 hours of presentation. Relevant variables for the model were selected with help from medical professionals. We learned the model using Bayesian search as implemented in GeNIe. Of 2,307 patients in the dataset, 679 were excluded. With the remaining 1,645 patients, we learned a model that predicted death with 86.4% accuracy. Some of the initial variables were discarded because they were independent of the outcomes of interest conditioned on some of the other variables. This high redundancy might be useful to build simpler tests for the severity of COVID-19. We show how the model can be used at different stages of patient admission and even with only partial information about the patient. This can be done by clinicians that want a fast second opinion or a summary of the available data from previous patients similar to the one at hand. We then include how we plan to improve the model with extra patient data and how it could be expanded to other contexts, like for example, an epidemiological one.