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A New Screening Method for COVID-19 based on Ocular Feature Recognition by Machine Learning Tools

The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has affected several million people. With the outbreak of the epidemic, many researchers are devoting themselves to the COVID-19 screening system. The standard practices for rapid risk screening of COVID-19 are the CT imaging or RT-PCR (real-time polymerase chain reaction). However, these methods demand professional efforts of the acquisition of CT images and saliva samples, a certain amount of waiting time, and most importantly prohibitive examination fee in some countries. Recently, some literatures have shown that the COVID-19 patients usually accompanied by ocular manifestations consistent with the conjunctivitis, including conjunctival hyperemia, chemosis, epiphora, or increased secretions. After more than four months study, we found that the confirmed cases of COVID-19 present the consistent ocular pathological symbols; and we propose a new screening method of analyzing the eye-region images, captured by common CCD and CMOS cameras, could reliably make a rapid risk screening of COVID-19 with very high accuracy. We believe a system implementing such an algorithm should assist the triage management or the clinical diagnosis. To further evaluate our algorithm and approved by the Ethics Committee of Shanghai public health clinic center of Fudan University, we conduct a study of analyzing the eye-region images of 303 patients (104 COVID-19, 131 pulmonary, and 68 ocular patients), as well as 136 healthy people. Remarkably, our results of COVID-19 patients in testing set consistently present similar ocular pathological symbols; and very high testing results have been achieved in terms of sensitivity and specificity. We hope this study can be inspiring and helpful for encouraging more researches in this topic.