A.I vs. CoronaVirus (A Bio-Techno Bloodshed)
The insider of how A.I tackles the new-age pandemic and how A.I is going to impact our future.
Here’s a short 5-min video (from BBC — click) on how ‘’click’’ discovers a new A.I tool that could help track the spread of CoronaVirus and find new treatments.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8luhuPY8gwo
For those of you who haven’t or couldn’t watch the video (or needs some extra information): The BBC team ‘click’ discovered a company under the name of ‘blue dot’. This Toronto-based startup that uses a platform built around A.I, machine learning, and big data to track and predict the outbreak and spread of infectious diseases, alerted its private sector and government clients about a ‘cluster of unusual pneumonia’ cases taking place around a market in Wuhan, China, and that was the first recognition of the novel CoronaVirus.
How do they do this wizardry you ask? The BlueDot engine gathers data on over 150 diseases and syndromes around the world searching every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day. This includes official data from organizations like the Center for Disease Control or the World Health Organization. Much of BlueDot’s predictive ability comes from data it collects outside official health care sources pouring through 100,000 online articles each day (like ‘Medium’) spanning 65 languages. BlueDot’s specialists manually classified the data, developed a taxonomy so relevant keywords could be scanned efficiently, and then applied machine learning and natural language processing to train the system. As a result, it says, only a handful of cases are flagged for human experts to analyze. BlueDot sends out regular alerts to health care and government The alerts provide brief synopses of anomalous disease outbreaks that its AI engine has discovered and the risks they may pose.
8 objectives that A.I is currently taking care of:
Identifying, tracking and forecasting the outbreaks: As I mentioned earlier, BlueDot, a venture-backed startup has managed to build an advanced AI platform that processes billions of pieces of data to identify these outbreaks. This data can include the world’s air travel network, health reports, and many others. Concerning the case of the coronavirus, BlueDot made its first alert on December 31st, 2019 (new year’s eve). This was much ahead as opposed to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which made its determination only on January 6th, 2020.
Helping in the diagnosis of the virus: Incidentally, BlueDot isn’t the only organization to have successfully leveraged AI in helping to restrict the coronavirus. Alibaba (a Chinese tech company) said AI can detect COVID-19 in just 20 seconds! The company has said that with the aid of A.I in CT scans, it can discern Coronavirus in just 20 seconds. The model has a precision rate of 96% and if doctors were to do the same, it would take up to 20 minutes. The algorithm was built by Alibaba’s research institute named Damo Academy. The AI model was upskilled with the help of data from more than 5,000 confirmed cases and can identify patients with the deadly virus with only CT scans.
Processing healthcare claims: With the virus spreading like wildfire, not only are the clinical operations of healthcare systems taxed but also the business and administrative divisions of it. A blockchain platform launched by Ant Financial is assisting in speeding up the processing claims by reducing the number of face-to-face interactions between patients and hospital staff.
Drones for the delivery of medical supplies: One of the safest and the swiftest procedures of supplying medical supplies during an epidemic is through drones. ‘Terra Drone’ is currently using its unmanned aerial transportation to deliver and transport medical supplies with a low rate of danger between Xinchang County’s disease Control Centre and the People’s Hospital.
Robots for sterilizing and delivering food supplies: Considering that robots aren’t susceptible to the virus, they are being utilized to complete tasks like cleaning, sterilizing and delivering medical supplies to decrease the amount of human-to-human contact. ‘Pudu Technology’, in China, has deployed robots that were originally used in catering to more than 40 hospitals around the country.
Assisting in the development of drugs: Weeks into the outbreak, AI’s predictive capabilities already began suggesting existing drugs that might be useful in its cure. ‘Google’s DeepMind’ division uses its latest AI algorithms to study and comprehend proteins that make up the virus and are publishing their findings to help in the development of treatments. ‘Chem Rxiv’ is using AI algorithms to identify Progeny (descendants) drugs similar to the parents, which is already being tested against COVID-19. These algorithms assess and judge similarity not only by the molecular make-up of the molecules but also by the context in which each specific functional group is arranged — by a three-dimensional distribution of pharmacophores. Progenies are essentially either already authorized drugs or are medications in advanced clinical trials. However, should the currently tested parent medicines fail, the progenies could be re-purposed against the COVID-19.
Every day wears for protection and precaution: An Israeli company, Sonovia aims at to arming healthcare systems with face masks made from their AI-based anti-pathogen, anti-bacterial fabric that relies on metal-oxide nanoparticles. With fever being one of the symptoms of the virus, security staff at Hongyuan Park in eastern China’s Hangzhou city have been given AI-enabled glasses that can detect the body temperature of visitors. Developed by an Hangzhou-based startup, ‘Rokid Corp’, these glasses work along with the concept of non-contact thermal AR (Augmented Reality). Fitted with a camera and a cable, the regular-looking glasses detect anybody with a fever — immediately sending alerts and making digital records.
Identifying and risk predicting of infected: A team of physicians at the Zhongnan Hospital at Wuhan in China are currently using a GPU (Graphics processing unit) -accelerated AI software model to detect visual signs of the COVID-19. The model depends on NVIDIA GPUs for both pieces of training as well as for inference, and it has managed to help overworked staff screen and prioritize patients that are likely to have the virus. Developed by a Beijing-based startup ‘Inferversion’ (As mentioned above), the software recognizes signs of pneumonia originated by the virus. While the software was primarily used in the detection of cancer in lung CTs, the newly developed model looks more closely at coronavirus pneumonia.
Supercomputers working on the CoronaVirus Vaccines: Supercomputers of numerous major tech companies like Huawei, Tencent and Didi are being used by researchers and analysts for the development and evolution of a cure or a vaccine for the virus. The speed of these computers is much quicker than the typical computer processing and hence can run rapid calculations and anticipate model solutions for necessary situations.
Overall, AI’s potential and capacity only continues to advance each day. In fact, with AI-empowered algorithms that are genome-based neural networks have already been built and constructed for personalized treatment. And this, as per specialists, can prove to be exceptionally helpful in managing adverse events and symptoms of the coronavirus.
