AI AGAINST THE PANDEMIC

Artificial Intelligence, in today’s world has proved to be an area of ever-growing applications to assist humans in their day to day activities. As demand of AI increases in healthcare, it will vital role in keeping us healthier and safer. AI has proved to be useful to improve the conditions of healthcare facilities such as managing medical records and other data, analyzing CT scans and X-rays and recommending appropriate treatment paths, drug creation, precision medicine, and digital consultation. With all these successful applications of AI already in existence, we can be sure to see many more in the near future.

In today’s situation where the COVID-19 has been officially, by the World Health Organization (WHO), declared as a global pandemic posing threat to the world human population, it is believed that AI can play a huge role to predict and minimize it’s spread and adversity. Till date AI has been used during this pandemic to track traveler data across the globe to be able to predict where the novel coronavirus could show up next. AI includes High-resolution computer-generated simulation which allows scientists to study and interpret large disease-related data sets such as the COVID-19 to learn more about how they spread.

A greater understanding of these phenomena can empower the community to respond far more rapidly to attacks and outbreaks. AI is already being used in hospitals to an extent. For example the Tampa General Hospital in Florida used AI to detect fever in visitors through facial scan. AI is also helping doctors at the Sheba Medical Centre in Israel to predict complications such as respiratory failure or sepsis in COVID-19 patients. Google’s DeepMind division used its latest AI algorithms and its computing power to understand the proteins that might make up the virus, and published the findings to help others develop treatments. BenevolentAI uses AI systems to build drugs that can fight the world’s toughest diseases and is now helping support the efforts to treat coronavirus, the first time the company focused it’s product on infectious diseases. Within weeks of the outbreak, it used it’s predictive capabilities to propose existing drugs that might be useful.

Application of artificial intelligence in COVID-19 disease management

image

Unprecedented pace of efforts to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic scenario is leveraged by massive information and computer science (AI). Various offshoots of AI are utilized in many disease outbreaks earlier. AI has achieved success in the identification of disease clusters, prediction of the future outbreaks, monitoring of cases, diagnosis of COVID-19, disease management by resource allocation, mortality risk and pattern recognition for studying the disease trend.

AI in prediction & tracking

AI can be used for predicting the spread of virus and developing warning systems earlier by extracting information from various social media platforms, news websites and provide information about the vulnerable regions and for prediction of morbidity and mortality. Bluedot identified a cluster of pneumonia cases and predicted the outbreak and geographical location of the COVID-19 outbreak based on available data using machine learning.

AI in early diagnosis

AI was used for the detection of COVID-19 cases from CT scan pictures and chest x-ray . Researchers have developed a deep learning model referred to as COVID-19 detection neural network (COVNet), for differentiating between COVID-19 and community-acquired respiratory disease supported visual second and 3D options extracted from meter chest CT scan. Singh et al. developed a completely unique deep learning model mistreatment Multi-Objective Differential Evolution and convolutional neural networks for COVID-19 designation employing a chest CT scan. COVID-ResNet was developed using automatic and discriminative learning rate and progressive image resizing performed higher than COVID-Net in identification of COVID-19. A case study used AI-based classifiers to predict the outcome of RT-PCR results of COVID-19 cases using just 16 simple parameters derived from complete blood profile.

image

AI in genomics

Randhawa et al. produced a method for accurate classification of SARS-CoV-2 genomes by applying various machine learning aglorithms on identified genomic signatures.

Many applications on the internet can be used to track the symptoms and curing process of many patients without creating chaos because with AI we can be assured that they use error free mechanisms. AI can also be used to study the nature of the novel virus and this could be a huge forward step to building the vaccination which is a guaranteed hope for the cure and prevention of this life-threatening virus.

Artificial Intelligence not solely tested to be a promising hand throughout this worldwide pandemic but will continue to be so in all the upcoming healthcare challenges. It will play a huge role in all advancements in medicine, medical treatments and diagnosis and drug developments. AI was found to be even more accurate than human experts in COVID-19 diagnosis and drug discovery. We would be needing larger datasets for training AI models and a legal framework and ethical considerations for sharing data before AI takes the forefront in diagnosis and other areas.

Resources