Hi everyone! We are splitting this main repo in repos for each project (android, ios, web, landing-page, core, etc). This should increase maintainability and separate concerns a little bit better.
The new repos will be grouped under our Github Organization. Here it is: https://github.com/FightCOVID19.
Please do not open new PR on this repo if your PR relates to any project found in the mentioned above. Do it on the corresponding project repo.
We started this group with an altruist objective in mind: To diagnose COVID-19 in chest X-ray. We perceived that task as a healthcare necessity and we began to work on it. So, a team of highly commited engineers started to work with that single objective on mind. In that path we found doctors willing to contribute. We had several videoconferences with them and we realized the full potential of our project. So, we decide to switch from our original and not so realistic objective to other more meaningful and needed project. We will use the amazing skills of all the team to create a world high impact surveillance app. So, the model became a secondary objective to work on. However, we recognize the attention we capture with it and we want to use all these attention in the necessities of the world facing the COVID pandemic.
Following the feedback of the doctors in our group, the app we are currently working on will follow the next 4 principles:
- To detect alarm signs
- To relief the load of the healthcare system by redirecting the low risk patients to sites with reliable information about health care and redirect the high-risk patients to the closest medical facility.
- To serve as generators of real-time information.
- To keep close links with healthcare authorities and generate useful epidemiological information.
We are still designing an artificial intelligence model for chest – x rays. But we have a slight switch according the medical feedback. So, right now, our main objective is:
- To Identify if AI has a role in the chest X-rays of patients with suspicion or diagnosis of coronavirus.
We are looking for high quality in the model we are about to release. We are increasingly curating additional datasets and will properly validate it. We have a team of radiologist collaborating with us. So, we are going to incorporate this model in our open-source app once it is adequately trained and validated. We want to be crystal-clear about the intentions of the team. We keep believing in the high impact of an open-source app able to provide real time information for patients, to relief the load of the healthcare providers and give useful insights to governments and health authorities.
As many know, the project went viral a lot in the last few days. When I started the project, I made a post on LinkedIn where I talked about an AI model that I developed to detect COVID-19 in x-ray images, I mentioned that even though the results ‘look promising’ I explicitly indicated that this model was far from being usable and it shouldn’t be used to make diagnoses or take medical decisions of any kind. This was WORK IN PROGRESS… we needed help from the right people with the right skills. I also indicated in the GitHub repo that I was looking some help from people able to improve and collect a better dataset.
With the help of doctors and inspecting more carefully the publicly available datasets, we realized that they were not up to the standard that we needed, and for that reason, some radiologists started helping us to curate and increasingly adding new images to a new dataset. In the next couple of days, we noticed some people working on the same technical problem (x-rays and covid19 detection), so we (as a community) focused our efforts more on how to get a better dataset so we could contribute and help them too. Soon, this was not ‘my project’ anymore but a multidisciplinary group of people with good intentions (including doctors, engineers, academics, etc ) working together on something that could have a positive impact. We had several videoconferences with people from all around the world and we realized the full potential of our project. So, we decide to switch from our original and not so realistic idea to a new solution that we believed was going to have even a bigger impact than our original idea. We called this collective consolidation of ideas the ‘New change of direction’. I explained the new vision to a very committed interdisciplinary group of people that were consistently contributing on the project. All of them, saw the importance of this project and recognized the value of it. I also shared on social media and Slack this ‘Change of Direction’ document, indicating that our app was not going to be anymore a ‘Diagnosis tool’ but still with new objectives in mind, had a more completed scope than before and was going to be able to align better with the current needs of the world as well as contributing to future research. In the next days, I might be sharing a more completed and detailed version of this new vision. I believe the scope has even more potential and impact than the original idea.
Unfortunately, this also brought the attention of specialists in these subjects, who, without paying attention to the indications that the model was not ready, that we needed a better dataset and help creating a better model, and without reading all of our disclaimers and publications began to say that the project was misleading and some even suggested I had commercial intentions with this. This has had some negative consequences in my personal life and for that reason I have decided to give a step back on this project at the moment. I have also been advised to take some days off and remove my presence from social media temporarily. So at least for the next couple of days, I will not be active in this group during those days.
However, there are already very committed people working on this initiative and I hope the project continue. I also hope the core team and everyone else keep working on this in my absence. Remember that this project does come from good intentions and it also represents the collective global summarization and validation of those who are contributing here in good faith, for a good cause. I appreciate the contribution of everyone in this project and I hope that the community respond positively and continue working towards it. Please let me know if you are interested in helping managing the slack channel, leading some groups or even helping with reviewing PRs, creating requirements, etc as I will be transferring the Admin Rights to those committed people that believe in what we are doing "an open-source app able to provide real time information for patients, to relief the load of the healthcare providers and give useful insights to governments and health authorities while contributing for the future research"
COVID-19 Detector by Camilo Pestana is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
