Artificial Intelligence for Pre-Anaemic Iron Deficiency Detection Using Rich Complete Blood Count Data

Iron deficiency (ID) is a major contributor to global disease burden and the leading cause of anaemia. Early detection is important for proactive management, but conventional complete blood count (CBC) screening often fails to identify non-anaemic iron deficiency (NAID) as many individuals maintain haemoglobin and red cell indices within reference ranges. Analysing 153,565 subjects from the INTERVAL, COMPARE and STRIDES studies, we show that CBC screening has only 40.5 % sensitivity for ID detection, falling to 21.9 % for NAID, highlighting a detection gap. CBC analysers generate a wealth of data beyond Electronic Health Record CBC parameters. We demonstrate that artificial intelligence applied to single-cell flow cytometry data from the CBC analyser achieves 83.7 % sensitivity for ID and 79.3 % for NAID. Our findings show that AI can greatly improve detection of a high-prevalence, important condition without changing infrastructure or diagnostic pathways, providing a valuable tool for proactive anaemia management.