Coronavirus… It’s all anyone can think of now. The 21st century – the era of technology, digital transformation and high-speed computing – is getting ravaged by a highly potent virus, which has to date claimed the lives of more than 10,000 people and has affected more than 250,000 people. And it shows no signs of slowing down. 

We truly live in alarming times. Scientists and medical researchers around the world are confounded at the virulence of COVID19, which has now been termed a pandemic by the WHO. In a matter of weeks, life as we know it, has drastically changed. Even as the world hurriedly resorts to social distancing to ‘flatten the curve’, there is still no cure in sight or a solution that can help reduce the burden on global healthcare systems. While Italy and Iran are currently reeling under the excessive strain of patients and insufficient resources to provide treatment, there have been reports that Israel is working on providing a vaccine to COVID19 and clinical trials have begun in the USA. 

However, the big question on everyone’s minds is – Can AI address this virus? It’s a Work In Progress, but definitely looks like AI can save the day. 

The strength of an AI algorithm is enhanced purely by the amount of datasets it can use. This improves the accuracy of the algorithm, making solutions more dependable and allowing researchers to develop a plan of action.

Here are some examples worldwide of how AI is being harnessed to address COVID19: 

Chinese Supercomputer Offering AI Diagnostic Tool: The AI system on the Tianhe-1 can process several hundred images generated by Computed Tomography (CT) and provide a diagnosis in 10 seconds. This test can be helpful to medical professionals, especially in places that are dealing with a sudden increase in cases and lack sufficient testing kits, as it can distinguish quickly between patients infected with COVID19 and those ailing from regular pneumonia or chest illness. 

South Korea Capitalises On Big Data & AI In Fight Against Coronavirus: Following an upsurge of cases in China, South Korea reported a significant increase as well. But shortly after, the country began making headlines for its seemingly measured and calculated strategy to curb the spread. One of the biggest reasons was the extensive use of AI & big data. The government- run big data platform stores information of citizens and resident foreign nationals, and integrated all this data into govt organisations, hospitals, financial service providers, operators and other essential services. Using AI-based applications, this information was analysed and used to intimate citizens of the whereabouts of an infected individual. This aggregate data was able to easily identify clusters of infected people and their movements, allowing the govt to provide alerts to the non-infected citizens. In addition, the govt also utilized AI to regulate the distribution of essential items (to avoid hoarding) and enable provision of masks to everyone. 

Alibaba Suggests Diagnostic Tool To Europe: Alibaba Group’s research & innovation institute called DAMO Academy has developed an AI-enabled system that can diagnose COVID19 with 96% accuracy in just 20 minutes. The algorithm has been trained using datasets and CT scans of more than 5,000 confirmed cases, and harnesses deep learning to study infection patterns. The AI system tracks treatment responses and provides diagnoses for suspected cases. 

“Time and precision. A CT machine typically has to produce 300 to 400 chest scans per patient to start the diagnosis of Covid-19. It would take even a very experienced doctor 10-15 minutes to go through such massive amounts of information, but trained AI systems can go through the scans in 20 to 30 seconds. Secondly, when we are dealing with a sudden and new viral outbreak, it’s a daunting task to train every single medical practitioner out there on how to spot the virus, so the AI system is used to serve as an analytical, second opinion for doctors.”

- Dr. Xu Minfeng, AI Algorithm Expert, DAMO Academy

• Alibaba Cloud Offers AI Platform To Support Coronavirus Solution Development: Alibaba Cloud, the data intelligence unit of Alibaba Group, has offered medical personnel around the world access to its cloud-based technology applications in the fight against COVID19. The series of cloud-native anti-coronavirus solutions stem from joint efforts of Alibaba Cloud’s solution experts, scientists and researchers from Alibaba DAMO Academy and the technical team at DingTalk, Alibaba’s conversational platform that supports more than 120 million students in China through live-streamed online classes. This offering has been taken up a notch to launch DingTalk’s International Medical Expert Communication Platform, hosted on Alibaba Cloud and offering free communication for medical workers globally to communicate with China’s doctors from medical institutions like First Affiliated Hospital of Zheijiang University and many others. Through video conferencing and real-time AI translation into 11 languages - Arabic, Bahasa, Chinese, English, French, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, and Vietnamese - Alibaba Cloud aims to build a virtual community, inviting Chinese doctors to share their experiences and answer questions from global peers. 
• From Alibaba’s DAMO Academy, three proven solutions are being made available via free trial for medical professionals and research institutes worldwide. Alibaba Cloud will work with local partners to deploy relevant services and solutions in accordance with local laws and regulations.
• Epidemic Prediction Solution models epidemic characteristics of COVID-19 in a particular region, providing estimates of size, peak time and duration of the epidemic, as well as the spreading trends under three conditions - optimistic, neutral, and pessimistic. Based on machine learning, the algorithm was already tested on 31 provincial data in China and averaged 98% accuracy. It can serve as a reference to policymakers and medical researchers on prevention and control measures, medical resource allocation and travel advisories.
• CT Image Analytics Solution is a CT image analytics technology services that can significantly improve testing accuracy and detection efficiency for diagnosing COVID-19. With deep-learning algorithms trained by data in China, the trained model can predict the probability of different pneumonia types, including the variety associated with COVID-19. It also performs computations of the proportion of lesions and the affected volume ratio to the entire lungs, by using the lung segmentation method. The whole test takes about 3 to 4 seconds to run and 15-16 seconds of transmission time,making it nearly 60x faster than human detection. More than 160 hospitals in China are currently using the solution.
• Genome Sequencing for Coronavirus Diagnostic Solution, an AI algorithm from Alibaba DAMO Academy and running on Alibaba Cloud, is a virus genome sequencing solution for coronavirus analytics, including viral genetic data screening, evolutionary analysis, protein structure analysis, and diagnostic reporting. It can complete the diagnosis of new coronavirus within 14 hours, which is five times faster than other available sequencing solutions in China. It can screen more than 20 people simultaneously, making the averaged time for each sample just around half an hour, much shorter than the normal two hours with the PCR method. The solution helps disease control centers, hospitals and clinics, and laboratories to address challenges such as insufficient nucleic acid detection capacity, high false-negative rates of the PCR method, and possible virus mutations.
• Supporting advanced innovations during emergencies like COVID-19 requires extremely scalable supercomputing power. For this, Alibaba Cloud offers Elastic High-Performance Computing (E-HPC) Solution for Life Sciences, a cloud-native high-performance computing cluster solution designed for researchers working on life sciences applications, especially for Computational-Driven-Drug-Design (CDDD) and AI-driven-Drug-Design (AIDDD). The solution already supports 20 research groups in China. For example, the intelligent CT diagnostic system on COVID-19 pneumonia developed by Tsinghua University can complete diagnosing in 10 seconds, and the performance of gene assembly by Sun Yat-sen University is accelerated by 25% utilizing the solution. Alibaba Cloud has also partnered with Global Health Drug Discovery Institute (GHDDI) in Beijing to launch an AI-driven-drug-discovery platform based on E-HPC.
• Baidu Hops On AI Bandwagon To Battle Coronavirus: Baidu’s Linearfold algorithms has been made available to the scientific & medical fraternity to fight the outbreak of Coronavirus. This algorithm – produced in association with the University of Rochester & Oregon State University can predict the virus’ secondary RNA structure faster, helping the research & medical community understand the spread of this virus across species. Since the outbreak, Baidu AI scientists have used this algorithm to predict secondary structure prediction for the COVID19 RNA sequence, bringing the analysis time from 57 minutes to 22 seconds. 
• NVIDIA Providing COVID19 Researchers Free Access To GPU-Powered Genome Sequencing Tool: NVIDIA, the world leader in visual computing technologies, will provide a free 90-day license to its Parabricks tool to any researcher in the worldwide effort to fight the novel coronavirus. Parabricks is a GPU-accelerated genome analysis toolkit, which can accelerate the analysis of sequence data by nearly 50x. While researchers would have to access NVIDIA’s GPUs for running this toolkit, they don’t have to pay any fee for running the software – a move that could significantly provide the research community an advantage while studying the novel Coronavirus strain. 
• White House Wants Researchers To Use AI To Analyse Academic Papers on Coronavirus: To date, there are about 29,000 research papers and academic articles on answering key questions surrounding Coronavirus. The White House has partnered with tech giants like Microsoft and Google to compile an exhaustive database of articles for researchers. ML can be used to decode these papers faster and help researchers understand this virus and its impact. 

India Accelerating Efforts On Using AI To Combat Coronavirus:

Although cases in India were reported almost a month after the outbreak in China and have been increasing by the day, the government, corporates & startup community are already working on providing solutions using AI. 

The COVID19 Solution Challenge has been thrown open to India’s startups – they have been asked to share their solutions with the government that can effectively help with curbing the spread of this virus.

BlinkIn, a NASSCOM CoE incubated startup, provided its XCare technology – a plug in solution that Augmented Reality & AI to help technicians provide remote support for the installation of Air Handling Units at the Huoshenshan Hospital in China. Even as other nations reel under the spike of cases, technologies like the ones provided by BlinkIn can be used to set up temporary field hospitals and intensive care units, without risking additional exposure. 

mFine, the AI-powered online consultation app, has partnered with Apollo Hospitals to do online consultations of suspected COVID19 patients and has also introduced a feature that can analyse a patient’s cough to indicate the extent and type of chest infection. So far, 1200 users have been assessed and doctors expect more in the days to come. This tool is especially handy since it completely mitigates the need for a patient to meet a doctor in person, and limits the chances of transmission. 

Image by mattthewafflecat via Pixabay