May 26, 2021

Artificial Intelligence and Coronavirus

Over the past decade or so, we have come across many viral diseases such as Chikungunya, Ebola, Zika, BirdFlu, etc., The world once again woke up to this decade with a new disease outbreak. An outbreak of a novel Coronavirus that emerged in the Wuhan City, Hubei province of China in December 2019. Most of the initially identified cases were traced back to the “wet market” where live animals are slaughtered and sold. The market was called as an amplification hotspot from where the virus spread to other parts of China and subsequently to other countries in a very short period of time. The WHO named this disease as ‘COVID-19’, which is an acronym of Coronavirus Disease 2019 on 11 Feb 2020.

The worst outbreak of COVID-19 are repotted in the US, India, Brazil and Russia where the number of cases has surpassed the confirmed cases in China. Hence looking at the situations, The WHO had to declare it has a ‘Public Health Emergency of International Concern’ on 30th January, 2020 and then has a ‘Pandemic’ on 11th March 2020.

Application of Artificial Intelligence in COVID-19 disease Management

Just when the situation was worsening on a daily basis, the experts had there job not shut but where fully into it and hence they came up with this idea of implementing AI in COVID-19 pandemic situation where an unprecedented pace of efforts to address the pandemic situation is leveraged by big data and AI. Various technologies of AI have been used in several disease outbreaks earlier. AI can play a vital role in the fight against this COVID-19 pandemic.

AI is being successfully used for the identifying the disease clusters, monitoring of cases, predicting the future outbreaks, mortality rates, diagnosis of COVID-19, disease management by resource allocation, facilitating training, etc. Some of the AI application that are the talk of the town are given below:

AI in prediction & tracking: AI can be used for forecasting the spread of virus as it can be used to create a early warning systems by extracting information from social media platforms, calls and news sites and provide useful information about the vulnerability regions and for the prediction of morbidity and mortality. One such advancement is the ‘Bluedot’ which identified a cluster of pneumonia cases and predicted its outbreak and the geographical location by using the data and Machine Learning technology. Recently the role of AI in the identification and forecasting of COVID-19 outbreaks by employing the multitudinal and multimodal data was also emphasised.

AI in contact tracing: AI can be used to increase the mobile applications related to health where the different smart devices like watches, mobile phones, cameras, etc., can be used for the purpose of diagnosis, contact tracing and also for the effective monitoring in COVID-19 cases and development.

AI in early diagnosis: The detection and quantification of the COVID-19 cases through CT Scan, x-ray images can be diagnosed early using AI technologies. Researchers have already developed a deep learning model called as the COVID-19 detection neural network (COVNet) for the purpose of differentiating between the COVID-19 and community-acquired pneumonia based on the advanced visual 2D & 3D features that is extracted from the volumetric chest CT scan. Examples: COVID-ResNet an AI based technology which is developed using automatic and discriminative learning rate and progressive image resizing performed better than COVID-Net in diagnosing the COVID-19 virus. RT-PCR is an other AI-based study which classifies and predicts the outcome of results of the COVID-19 test. COVID_MTNet is an other technology created by applying improved Inception Recurrent Residual Neural Network and NABLA-3 network models for the purpose of detecting and localisation of regions of interests from both x-rays and chest CT scan.

AI in monitoring of COVID-19 cases: Various AI techniques are applied for keeping a track of patients in clinical settings and predicting the course of treatment. All these is possible with the data available through various parameters. AI can also provide some of the critical data/information for purpose of resource allocation and decision making by prioritising the needs of ventilators and respiratory supports in the ICU. AI can also be used for the prediction of recovery or the mortality rate related to the COVID-19, helps to provide daily updates, storage, trend analysis and figuring out the course of treatment.

AI in the reduction of burden for the medical practitioners & healthcare staff: The AI based triage systems can help in reducing the burden of our frontline workers i.e., medical and healthcare workers by completely automating several processes which is required for them such as imparting to practitioners, understanding of the mode of treatment, analysing the data using pattern recognition approaches, digitalisation of patient’s reports etc., all these helps the doctors in reducing the direct contact with the patients.

AI in protein structure prediction: AI can be helpful in predicting the structure of important proteins that are very important for the virus to infect and also replication and provide useful insight that can create a way for the drug development within a very short period of time. AlphaFold algorithms of the Google Deep mind got something called as the Deep Residual Networks(DRN) - ResNets for predicting the protein structures of membrane protein.

AI in development of Vaccines: Never before in the history of mankind has witnessed such a race for the development of vaccine against a dangerous pathogen like this. However, the pace of discovery can be increased by harnessing the power of AI. Some of them have predicted the possible vaccine candidates for the COVID-19 using the Vaxign reverse vaccinology-machine learning platform that is mostly relied on the supervised classification models.

Conclusion:

Getting ourselves adopted to a three-pronged approach that is based on the testing, isolation, and contact tracing is warranted to fight against COVID-19. It is more than necessary to exploit the available knowledge base to develop the effective chemotherapeutic agents in the COVID-19, learning the necessary lessons from the effects in present and in the past.

Though there’s a vaccine available at the moment, it is our duty to take care of ourselves and our surroundings and spread the importance of safety against the Pandemic situation. As there is the third outbreak of the virus expected in the coming days, It is important to stay safe and fight the pandemic smartly just like our experts are using AI in different ways to find out different things.

It is said that AI’s prediction was found to be more than par and even more accurate than the human’s prediction in the COVID-19 diagnosis and drug discovery.

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