Artificial Intelligence's role in fighting Covid-19
For years countless investigations and advances have been made in the development of technology applied to the field of health and medicine. Far from interrupting the expansion experienced in this field, the Covid-19 has accelerated it and every day new advances appear that elevate artificial intelligence as an important weapon to prevent and combat the devastating effects that the SARS Cov-2 virus is leaving in the population.
Until the arrival of a vaccine, this technology will continue to offer a wide range of solutions in the diagnosis, analysis and evolution of covid patients, a development that will allow science to gain time and save lives.
We review some of the advances that have taken place in this area during the last few months and which have been reported in numerous media.
A few days before the World Health Organization issued an official statement on the spread of the coronavirus, the Canadian company Bluedot, dedicated to tracking the spread of infectious diseases using AI, warned of the danger of this type of pneumonia, as reported by The Wired at the end of January. From here on, we all know the outcome of this announcement, however, from here on, the circumstances also arose for different companies dedicated to artificial intelligence to develop projects to help in this biological warfare.
Thus, for example, through the use of artificial intelligence, the Government of the City of Buenos Aires developed a system that seeks to detect patients with coronavirus through automatic learning algorithms, based on voice, breathing and coughing sounds. This way, the application is able to discern if the cough is compatible with the coronavirus.
Within a more clinical environment, researchers from the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV), together with the Health Research Institute (INCLIVA) of the Hospital Clínico Universitario de Valencia and the Research Institute of the Hospital Universitario 12 de Octubre in Madrid are working on a new tool that will help to give a prognosis for each patient with COVID-19 at the time of admission, through artificial intelligence and automatic learning techniques. Combining information on symptoms, comorbidities and laboratory tests, it allows to obtain that personalized prognosis for each individual and classify it according to the level of severity that could be reached.
A study carried out by the University of Central Florida (UCF) showed that artificial intelligence offers up to 90% reliability when it comes to detecting Covid-10 in the lungs of affected patients through CT scans. Therefore, two Chinese companies have developed AI-based coronavirus diagnostic software to detect lung problems using computed tomography (CT) scans. Originally used to diagnose lung cancer, the software can also detect pneumonia associated with respiratory diseases such as coronavirus.
Prevention of this disease has also been a key focus of AI-based research, and many of the solutions have been realized in tracking applications that have been implemented, with varying degrees of success, in many countries. Likewise, its application has been fundamental for pharmaceutical companies that have seen how thanks to this technology they have been able to reduce waiting times in the search for new drugs and vaccines that help fight the coronavirus.
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