A journey through the disorderly world of diagnostic and prognostic models for covid-19: a living systematic review.
Seminar with Laure Wynants, assistant professor of Epidemiology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands and KU Leuven, Belgium: Diagnostic and prognostic models could provide an evidence-based approach for efficient triage of suspected or infected patients. However, since the covid-19 outbreak, over 200 models have been proposed, and the number keeps growing. We performed a rigorous systematic review and standardized risk of bias assessment of published and pre-print papers proposing prediction models for covid-19. It has been dubbed "the fastest systematic review ever", and has transformed into a "living" review, with multiple updates published since the original publication. In this talk, we will describe the study setup and results. We review the spectrum of available models, ranging from simple scoring systems to AI based on medical imaging, and pinpoint important issues with the study design and analysis that hamper their reliability.