ResApp Health (ASX:RAP), the developer of smartphone medical applications for the diagnosis and management of respiratory disease, has provided an update on its paediatric clinical study being undertaken at Joondalup Health Campus (JHC) and Princess Margaret Hospital (PMH) in Perth.
598 subjects (481 confirmed respiratory disease cases and 117 control cases) are now enrolled in the study.
The company said preliminary analysis by the research team, led by Associate Professor Udantha Abeyratne, has highlighted the high level of accuracy of ResApp’s diagnostic algorithms for the identification of lower respiratory tract disease.
Lower respiratory diseases (such as bronchiolitis and pneumonia) are often more severe than upper respiratory tract infections (URTIs), and the ability to differentiate between these two categories is critical for effective treatment and advice, it said.
Traditional diagnostic techniques rely on chest auscultation (listening with a stethoscope), often followed by additional observations (such as oxygen saturation) and tests (chest x-ray, blood tests, sputum tests).
ResApp said its dataset of 218 lower respiratory tract disease cases includes 24 cases where auscultation by experienced paediatric clinical teams was clear. Only after further observations and tests were these 24 cases correctly diagnosed with lower respiratory tract disease. In 19 of these cases (80 per cent) ResApp’s algorithms were able to identify lower respiratory tract involvement without the use of additional clinical observations or additional tests.
ResApp said its diagnostic tool also achieved overall accuracy levels in excess of 90 per cent when used to differentiate between lower respiratory tract diseases and URTIs with no lower respiratory tract involvement, and achieved 99 per cent accuracy when distinguishing between patients with a lower respiratory tract disease and subjects with no discernible respiratory tract disease.
“These results clearly demonstrate that ResApp’s diagnostic tool outperforms experienced clinicians using stethoscopes and can match the results provided by an entire suite of expensive, time-consuming clinical tests,” said Dr Tony Keating, CEO and Managing Director of ResApp.
“We are confident that ResApp’s accuracy will improve even further as we enrol more patients.” As with previous analyses, the performance of the algorithm was evaluated using the method of leave-one-out cross-validation against the JHC or PMH medical team’s final clinical diagnosis based on clinical presentations, auscultation findings and imaging as well as laboratory test results."
