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Abstract Background Accurate diagnostic strategies to identify SARS-CoV-2 positive individuals rapidly for management of patient care and protection of health care personnel are urgently needed. The predominant diagnostic test is viral RNA detection by RT-PCR from nasopharyngeal swabs specimens, however the results are not promptly obtainable in all patient care locations. Routine laboratory testing, in contrast, is readily available with a turn-around time (TAT) usually within 1-2 hours. Method We developed a machine learning model incorporating patient demographic features (age, sex, race) with 27 routine laboratory tests to predict an individual’s SARS-CoV-2 infection status. Laboratory testing results obtained within 2 days before the release of SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR result were used to train a gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT) model from 3,356 SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR tested patients (1,402 positive and 1,954 negative) evaluated at a metropolitan hospital. Results The model achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.854 (95% CI: 0.829-0.878). Application of this model to an independent patient dataset from a separate hospital resulted in a comparable AUC (0.838), validating the generalization of its use. Moreover, our model predicted initial SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR positivity in 66% individuals whose RT-PCR result changed from negative to positive within 2 days. Conclusion This model employing routine laboratory test results offers opportunities for early and rapid identification of high-risk SARS-CoV-2 infected patients before their RT-PCR results are available. It may play an important role in assisting the identification of SARS-CoV-2 infected patients in areas where RT-PCR testing is not accessible due to financial or supply constraints. 

Privacy concerns on sharing sensitive data across institutions are particularly paramount for the medical domain, which hinders the research and development of many applications, such as cohort construction for cross-institution observational studies and disease surveillance. Not only that, the large volume and heterogeneity of the patient data pose great challenges for retrieval and analysis. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a Federated Patient Hashing (FPH) framework, which collaboratively trains a retrieval model stored in a shared memory while keeping all the patient-level information in local institutions. Specifically, the objective function is constructed by minimization of a similarity preserving loss and a heterogeneity digging loss, which preserves both inter-data and intra-data relationships. Then, by leveraging the concept of Bregman divergence, we implement optimization in a federated manner in both centralized and decentralized learning settings, without accessing the raw training data across institutions. In addition to this, we also analyze the convergence rate of the FPH framework. Extensive experiments on real-world clinical data set from critical care are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on similar patient matching across institutions.