AI for COVID-19

HOW FAR HAS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE REACHED TO BEAT THE NOVEL COVID-19?

Technology has been efficacious invariably in extricating living beings from perilous diseases. Any disease can become more threatening when humankind is incapacitated in spotting its existence in the body, and thus, it always acts as a conundrum for them.  The burgeoning science and technology sector has come up with a plan of bringing AI into play by using it to detect intimidating viruses.

Since the first report of the novel COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, it is now a pandemic causing stillness to at least 140 countries. As China initiated its response to the virus, it leaned on its strong technology sector and specifically artificial intelligence (AI), data science, and technology to track and fight the pandemic while tech leaders, including Alibaba, Baidu, Huawei and more accelerated their company's healthcare initiatives. As a result, tech start-ups are integrally involved with clinicians, academics, and government entities around the world to activate technology as the virus continues to spread in many other countries and India as well.

The patient-doctor ratio in India is as low as 1,700:1. Also, ~70% of the healthcare infrastructure is in cities, which cater to ~30% of the country's population. With the use of artificial intelligence applications, doctors can offer their services to more patients and reduce the existing gap in demand and supply of medical services in the country. AI-enabled healthcare services can be delivered at lower costs with increased efficiency and an emphasis on diagnostics. Moreover, artificial intelligence enables hospitals to implement patient-centric plans and eliminate unnecessary hospital procedures, making delivery of healthcare services faster in India.

Here are 10 ways, artificial intelligence, data science, and technology are being used to manage and fight COVID-19:

1. To identify, track and forecast outbreaks:

To fight Covid-19 we must be able to track it. By frequently analysing news reports, social media platforms, travel records and government documents, AI can learn to detect an outbreak. Tracking infectious disease risks by using AI is exactly what the Canadian start-up BlueDot provides. The BlueDot’s AI warned of the threat several days before the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention or the World Health Organization issued their public warnings.


Kamran Khan, the Blue dot Founder and CEO says the algorithm doesn’t use social media postings because that data is too messy. But he does have one trick up his sleeve: access to global airline ticketing data that can help predict where and when infected residents are headed next. It correctly predicted that the virus would jump from Wuhan to Bangkok, Seoul, Taipei, and Tokyo in the days following its initial appearance.

2. To help diagnose the virus:

Artificial Intelligence Company Infervision launched a coronavirus AI solution that helps front-line healthcare workers detect and monitor the disease efficiently.They use AI in detecting the disease competently which in turn helps in averting its swift spread.Viruses have made the work of individuals concerned with the healthcare facilities increasingly onerous but this solution helps them by reducing the time taken for CT diagnosis. Jack Ma's e-commerce company Alibaba also asseverates that they have built up an AI-driven system that is accurate up to 96% in diagnosing the virus within seconds.

3. Advanced fabrics offer protection:

An Israeli start-up Sonovia provides healthcare sectors, public and government officials with face masks made from their fabricated anti-pathogen, anti-bacterial fabric which relies on metal-oxide nanoparticles.

4. To process healthcare claims:

The financial transactions of the business field aren't the only one to be monitored but the ones being carried out in the field of medicines and health centres should also be.  This is so because many companies, hospitals and health centres etc. which manufacture and distribute medicines, antiseptics and disinfectants etc.deal with a huge sum of money. These transactions are to be kept an eye on, to prevent any mishap or to prevent someone from taking advantage out of this situation. This requires constant surveillance and with the COVID 19 breakout throughout the world which has been said to be 'pandemic' by the WHO, least contact in person to person should be maintained. With such a huge amount of money involved a blockchain platform which works with peer to peer network can be trusted and the money can be handled safely and so can the patients and hospital staff. The hospital staff can still provide the patients with their needs of medicines and surgical masks etc. without coming in contact with them. They can sit behind the monitor and handle everything easily and safely with a little bit of care.

5. To let drones deliver medical supplies:

Getting vital equipment and medicines from A to B is not always a straightforward process, especially in harsh environments like war zones or during environmental disasters. Consequently, drones are deployed to help speed up the delivery process. Medical Technology rounds up key areas where drones are helping to get medical supplies where they are most needed. Terra Drone is using its unmanned aerial vehicles to transport medical samples and quarantine material with minimal risk between Xinchang County’s disease control centre and the People’s Hospital. Drones also are used to patrol public spaces, track non-compliance to quarantine mandates, and for thermal imaging.

6. Develop drugs:

Google's DeepMind has shared AI-generated predictions about the Coronavirus that could help researchers stem the global outbreak.

Google’s DeepMind division used its latest AI algorithms and its computing power to recognize the proteins that might compose the virus and published the findings to help others develop treatment methods. Google’s DeepMind unit this week offered up data files of its best guess of the structure of some proteins that may be implicated in the Coronavirus.

 Proteins do the vast amount of the work of organisms, and understanding the three-dimensional shape of the proteins in COVID-19 couldprovide a kind of blueprint of the virus behind the disease, which could conceivably aid in coming up with a vaccine. Efforts are underway around the world to deduce the structure of those viral proteins, of which DeepMind's is just one effort. 

DeepMind's protein-probing program reflects decades of work by chemists and physicists, biologists, computer and data scientists and use AI to mine through existing medical information to find drugs that they say might be helpfulto tackle the novel Coronavirus.

The company BenevolentAI uses AI systems to build drugs that can combat the world’s toughest diseases and is presently helping support. Within weeks of the outbreak, it utilized its predictive capabilities to propose existing drugs that might be useful. 

Meanwhile, a Maryland-based biotech company, Insilico, used AI to come up with new molecules that could serve as potential medications, and it will now synthesize and test 100 of the compounds.

7. Sterilization, delivery of food/supplies and execution of other such tasks using robots:

Robots being unsusceptible to the virus are deployed to perform several tasks such as cleaning, sterilizing and delivering food and medicines to reduce the amount of human-to-human contact. Examples are the UVD robots from Blue Ocean Robotics which uses ultraviolet light to autonomously kill bacteria and viruses. In China, Pudu Technologydeployed its robots that are typically used in the catering industry to more than 40 hospitals around the country.

8. AI to identify non-compliance or infected individuals:

 ‘Smart helmets’ are used by the officials in Sichuan province to identify people with fever. China government’s surveillance system uses facial recognition and temperature detection software from SenseTime to identify people who might have a fever and be more likely to have the virus. The Chinese government has also developed a monitoring system called Health Code that uses big data to identify and assesses the risk of each individual based on their travel history, how much time they have spent in virus hotspots, and potential exposure to people carrying the virus. 

9. Supercomputers working on a coronavirus vaccine:

To curtail the accelerated spread of Corona virus and at the same time minimize the number of individual being prone to it, several supercomputers have been deployed, which aims to develop a Corona virus vaccine. Technologies like the cloud computing resources and supercomputers of almost every major tech companies such as Tencent, DiDi, and Huawei are being used by researchers to fast-track the development of either a cure or vaccine for the virus. The major objective is that the rate at which these systems run calculations and provide model solutions is greater than standard computer processing.

10. Chatbots to share information:

Tencent’s WeChat, where people can access free online health consultation services through chatbots has proved to be an essential communication tool for service providers in the travel and tourism industry to keep travellers updated on the latest travel procedures and disruptions and to the people who use public transport for office work.

Technology has always been a boon to the civilisation. The above examples clearly are a witness to this fact and can be used to maintain optimism in this situation of panic. IEEE SB NITP would like to remind everyone that our organizations are leaving no stone unturned to fight the novel Covid-19 and therefore we should fully cooperate with the guidelines as issued by the government and the WHO.

Please visit https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019 for protective measures, mask usage and disposal, effective ways of washing hands, what to eat, myths and lot more.

Stay safe readers!