Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence has been playing a key role in better understanding and addressing the pandemic.

As the world grapples with COVID-19, every ounce of technological innovation and ingenuity harnessed to fight this pandemic brings us one step closer to overcoming it. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning have been playing a key role in better understanding and addressing the COVID-19 crisis. AI technology enables computers to mimic human intelligence and ingest large volumes of data to quickly identify patterns and insights.

In the fight against COVID-19, organizations have been quick to apply their AI expertise in several areas: scaling customer communications, understanding how COVID-19 spreads and speeding up research and treatment.

AI tools and techniques can help policymakers and the medical community understand the COVID-19 virus and accelerate research on treatments by rapidly analyzing large volumes of research data. AI text and data mining tools can uncover the virus’ history, transmission, diagnostics, management measures, and lessons from previous epidemics. 

Early Detection and Diagnosis of the Infection

AI can quickly analyze irregular symptoms and other ‘red flags’ and thus alarm the patients and the healthcare authorities. It helps to provide faster decision-making, which is cost-effective. It helps to develop a new diagnosis and management system for the COVID 19 cases, through useful algorithms. AI is helpful in the diagnosis of infected cases with the help of medical imaging technologies like Computed tomography (CT), Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of human body parts.

Monitoring the Treatment

AI can build an intelligent platform for automatic monitoring and prediction of the spread of this virus. A neural network can also be developed to extract the visual features of this disease, and this would help in proper monitoring and treatment of the affected individuals. It has the capability of providing day-to-day updates of the patients and also to provide solutions to be followed in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Contact Tracing of the Individuals

AI can help analyze the level of infection by this virus, identify the clusters and ‘hot spots' and can successfully do the contact tracing of the individuals and also monitor them. It can predict the future course of this disease and its likely reappearance.

Projection of Cases and Mortality

This technology can track and forecast the nature of the virus from the available data, social media and media platforms, about the risks of the infection and its likely spread. Further, it can predict the number of positive cases and deaths in any region. AI can help identify the most vulnerable regions, people and countries and take measures accordingly.

Development of Drugs and Vaccines:

AI is used for drug research by analyzing the available data on COVID-19. It is useful for drug delivery design and development. This technology is used in speeding up drug testing in real-time, where standard testing takes plenty of time and hence helps to accelerate this process significantly, which may not be possible by a human]. It can help to identify useful drugs for the treatment of COVID-19 patients. It has become a powerful tool for diagnostic test designs and vaccination development. AI helps in developing vaccines and treatments at a much faster rate than usual and is also helpful for clinical trials during the development of the vaccine.

Reducing the Workload of Healthcare Workers

Due to a sudden and massive increase in the numbers of patients during the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare professionals have a very high workload. Here, AI is used to reduce the workload of healthcare workers. It helps in early diagnosis and providing treatment at an early stage using digital approaches and decision science, offering the best training to students and doctors regarding this new disease. AI can impact future patient care and address more potential challenges which reduce the workload of the doctors.

Prevention of the Disease

With the help of real-time data analysis, AI can provide updated information which is helpful in the prevention of this disease. It can be used to predict the probable sites of infection, the influx of the virus, the need for beds and healthcare professionals during this crisis. AI is helpful for future virus and diseases prevention, with the help of previous mentored data over data prevalent at different times. It identifies traits, causes, and reasons for the spread of infection. In the future, this will become an important technology to fight against other epidemics and pandemics. It can provide a preventive measure and fight against many other diseases. In the future, AI will play a vital role in providing more predictive and preventive healthcare.