Artificial Intelligence has dazzled the world with its power and efficiency. AI technology has been used to make everything from chatbots to stock market trading to playing chess. But perhaps its most consequential test will be its role in helping the world overcome the CoVid pandemic. Today researchers and public health professionals are finding innovative uses for AI in drug research, contact tracing, contactless treatment, and more.
One application of artificial intelligence is early detection and diagnosis of covid19. AI utilizes algorithms to expeditiously analyse symptoms and cost effectively alert both patients and authorities in case of a positive case. Given that a paramount challenge is the spread through asymptomatic patients, The West Virginia Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute (RNI) and WVU Medicine, along with Oura Health,are developing technologies trying to predict covid symptoms before they appear. Physiological data including body temperature and heart rate are recorded predicting covid symptoms upto three days before they appear with around ninety percent accuracy. Another indispensable application of AI is contact tracing. Once someone tests positive an important next step is to prevent wider spread of the disease. Through the use of technologies including bluetooth, global positioning system(gps), the infected patients are tracked virtually virtually in real time. Many countries which have adopted a system based on artificial intelligence and machine learning have noted a greater effectiveness then the traditional healthcare process.
Additionally, AI can look at a person’s medical history, background, location and other factors and estimate their likelihood of contracting or dying from the virus. A similar data-driven approach is already used by firms like Netflix, Amazon and Google. Firstly, the AI will be trained on data from existing patients by noticing patterns and trends such as how a high proportion of casualties are above the age of 60. Then the AI looks at your data. Through factors such as age, history of respiratory diseases,vaccination record and close contact with elderly people, AI can determine one’s risk of contracting the virus and exhibiting symptoms. Thus instead of having to keep everyone at home, only those that the AI flags as ‘at-risk’ need to stay home, so governments can commence deconfinement and renew economic activity.
Over the past decade AI has revolutionised the development of drugs and vaccines, exponentially reducing both cost and time. Conventional vaccine development methods are expensive and trial and error tests can take years to produce viable results. Hence since the outbreak of covid 19 different AI approaches have been adopted to find epitopes which can be used to design vaccines. AI based screening techniques can potentially help understand essential parts of the virus such as protein structure which is useful since drugs are majorly designed based on molecular structures. AI can also provide critical insights to repurpose existing drugs or create new ones. The results can then be fed into a drug design system, improving them so that they are fit for production. With AI, the experimental data can be returned in real time with increasing efficiency. Many companies have shifted to this including British pharma company Exscientia. They were able to complete the exploratory research phase in under 12 months instead of the traditional 5 years.
The results of using AI to fight the pandemic look promising. Countries all over the world are using different AI based apps to monitor patients and do contact tracing. In addition, many governments are already using AI to model different outbreak scenarios and make decisions about lifting their lockdown and reopening. Furthermore, all of the major drug development efforts, from the pharmaceutical company Innoplexus to the University of Chicago are pursuing AI-based approaches. The coronavirus is a complex problem, but AI, the world’s most sophisticated problem-solving tool will certainly help us tackle it.
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Great Article..looking forward to many more!!
This is amazing :) look forward for more articles!! 🙂
hi Ashna and Avni....wish you both all the very best for this endeavour......will look forward eagerly for your articles🙂👍