The Role Of Technology & AI In Fighting The Coronavirus Epidemic

Artificial intelligence (AI) is being used as a tool to support the fight against the viral pandemic that has affected the entire world since the beginning of 2020. The press and the scientific community are echoing the high hopes that data science and AI can be used to confront the coronavirus while also giving scientists and medical professionals the opportunity to ‘fill the blanks’ still left. 

China, the first epicentre of this disease and renowned for its technological advance in this field, has tried to use this to its real advantage. China has been using AI and other technologies for measures restricting the movement of populations, forecasting the evolution of disease outbreaks and research for the development of a vaccine or treatment. With regard to the vaccine creation, AI has been used to speed up genome sequencing, make faster diagnoses and carry out scanner analyses. 

AI has become one of the first lines of defense in the pandemic. Hospitals are using it to help screen and triage patients and identify those most likely to develop severe symptoms. They’re scanning faces to check temperatures and harnessing fitness tracker data, to zero in on individual cases and potential clusters. They are also using AI to keep tabs on the virus in their own communities. They need to know who has the disease, who is likely to get it, and what supplies are going to run out tomorrow, two weeks from now, and further down the road.

However, it’s not clear if these AI tools are going to work. Many are based on drips of data, often from patients in China with severe disease. Those data might not be applicable to people in other places or with milder disease. Hospitals are testing models for Covid-19 care that were never intended to be used in such a scenario. Some AI systems could also be susceptible to overfitting, meaning that they’ve modeled their training data so well that they have trouble analyzing new data — which is coming in constantly as cases rise.

While organizations like WHO and UN are releasing funds to facilitate research, many are looking towards AI to decelerate the crisis. Here are some very good examples of how the scientific communities across the world are galvanizing to find a 21st-century solution to a 21st-century problem.  

Alibaba has recently claimed that its new AI system can detect coronavirus in CT scans of patients’ chests with 96% accuracy against viral pneumonia cases. Its founder Jack Ma has also announced that his foundation will be donating $2.15m for developing the vaccine. Their new algorithm cuts down the whole process of recognition to a record 20 seconds. This is a vast improvement considering the traditional methods would take approximately 15 min to analyse a CT scan.

Baidu’s AI team has released a tool — LinearFold to reduce 2019-nCoV prediction time from 55 minutes to 27 seconds. This cut down of prediction time is crucial for understanding the virus and catalyse drug discovery. 

John Brownstein of Harvard Medical School is part of an international team that is using machine learning to skim through social media and other forms of data from official public health channels, and healthcare providers, in order to prepare real-time health analytics of the outbreak.

Doctors in China have been given a new powerful tool to help them quickly diagnose potential coronavirus sufferers. Called inferVISION, this AI-based software can quickly highlight potential problem cases in record time. inferVISION can identify typical signs or partial signs of COVID-19 in suspected patients. In order to do this, the software looks out for signs of pneumonia that can be caused by the virus.

To reinforce the contactless monitoring of the outbreak, Chinese firms are using drones. Pudu Technology from Shenzhen has reportedly installed its machines in more than 40 hospitals around the country to help medical staff. MicroMultiCopter, another company based out of Shenzhen, is deploying drones to transport medical samples and conduct thermal imaging.

UVD Robots, who are based out of Denmark, are using their robots to disinfect patient rooms with zero human interference. Pandemics make human assistance, both critical and dangerous. The medical personnel are at severe risk of catching the disease. UVD’s roving robotic pods emit ultraviolet light over the region to be disinfected and terminating any kind of virus.

Then again, once the global health community has coronavirus under control, markets will still have to grapple with the economic effects of the disease. Chinese company WeBank is using AI to track China’s economic recovery. The system analyses satellite imagery, GPS data from mobile phones, and social media posts, which reveal the state of manufacturing and commercial activity. Using the data, the system gathered, researchers predict that most Chinese workers outside Wuhan will return to work by the end of this month and that China’s economic growth in the first quarter of 2020 will decrease by 36%.

But, A Major Question Still Remains - Can AI Stand On Its Own?

Although AI has played a considerably big part in the COVID-19 pandemic so far, several concerns about the utility of the technology remain, particularly about its ability to function without human involvement. With countries across the world cracking down on social distancing, some major websites are turning to AI systems as they tell their employees to work from home – including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. As a result, these tech giants are relying on automated algorithms to find and remove problematic material on their platforms which could lead to major blunders.

While this development doesn’t directly apply to healthcare, it does raise some important questions about the ability of AI to function on its own. We have all previously expressed concerns about AI replacing workforces, but these anxieties have abated in recent years as most in the industry have come to view AI as tools that can augment physical practices.

In the case of COVID-19, it seems that experts are taking a similar stance. People working at outbreak sites can collect vital data on COVID-19, which could then be used to train AI models. This data includes transmissibility, risk factors, incubation period, and mortality rate. We cannot replace the human brain at this point, nor doctors, scientists and medical professionals who can analyze and rapidly do what is necessary at the onset of an outbreak. We still need to prime that AI with information from study of the evidence and link this to events in the outbreak. 

My final thoughts…

Currently there are no approved treatments or vaccines for COVID-19, but medical researchers are working hard to change that. First, researchers need to understand the virus’ structure. AI-generated predictions of a virus’ structure can save scientists months of experimentation, so companies can hopefully make treatments and vaccines available while an outbreak is still ongoing instead of years later. 

We are in a critical juncture in the outbreak. As the experts and policymakers around the world shift their focus towards containing COVID-19, the role of surveillance, drug discovery and diagnosis have become crucial, and with AI, there will be a tremendous saving of time and indeed, lives.