Artificial intelligence in COVID-19

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming our lifestyle intending to mimic human intelligence by a computer/machine in solving various issues. Initially, AI was designed to overcome simpler problems like winning a chess game, language recognition, image retrieval, among others. With the technological advancements, AI is getting increasingly sophisticated at doing what humans do, but more efficiently, rapidly, and at a lower cost in solving complex problems.

AI in healthcare provides an upper hand undoubtedly over traditional analytics and clinical decision‐making techniques. Machine learning (ML) algorithms, a subset of AI, can detect patterns from huge complex datasets to become more precise and accurate as they interact with training data, allowing humans to gain unprecedented insights into early detection of diseases, drug discovery, diagnostics, healthcare processes, treatment variability, and patient outcomes.

The different roles played by AI during pandemics are early warning and alerts, prediction and detection of outbreak of diseases, real‐time disease monitoring worldwide, analysis and visualization of spreading trends, prediction of infection rate and infection trend, rapid decision‐making to identify the effective treatments, study and analysis of the pathogens, and drug discovery. All these are executed at a greater speed with AI.

Several terabytes of data which includes patients' case history, geographical events, and social media posts about a new pneumonia are processed at a rapid rate with high‐performance computing to predict the possible outbreak of a pandemic. 

Most importantly unsupervised ML can identify its own pattern from the noise (historical and real‐time data) rather than the training it on a preselected dataset, thus giving a wider possibility and new behavior. An AI model trained to predict a particular disease can be retrained on the new data of a new or different disease.

AI can be used as an early outbreak warning system, BlueDot, an AI‐driven algorithm not only successfully detected the outbreak of Zika virus in Florida but also spotted COVID‐19, 9 days before the WHO released its statement alerting people to the emergence of a novel coronavirus.

Researchers from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) and Tongji Hospital in Wuhan, Hubei have developed an AI diagnostic tool (lXGBoost machine learning‐based prognostic mode) that can quickly analyse blood samples to predict survival rates of COVID‐19 infected patients and it turns out to be 90% accurate.

• COVID‐Net, a deep learning model is designed to detect the COVID‐19 positive cases from chest X‐rays and accelerate treatment for those who need it the most.
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• Several AI‐based computer vision camera systems are deployed in China and across the world to scan crowds for COVID‐19 symptoms and monitor people during lockdown.
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AI‐powered autonomous service robots and humanoid robots “Cloud Ginger (aka XR‐1)” are used in hospitals at Wuhan, China. The first is used to assist the healthcare workers to deliver the foods and medicines to the patients and the latter is used to entertain the patients during quarantine.
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• There are also few AI models that are a hit and miss due to lack of historical training data. Though AI has not completely evolved to overcome a pandemic, but the role of AI is noticeably high during COVID‐19 when compared to that of previous pandemics and is rightly used as a tool complementing the human intelligence.