The coronavirus crisis has spiralled out of control and continues to ravage the world. With the medical infrastructures getting overwhelmed due to increasing caseloads, it becomes increasingly important to devise innovative ways of dealing with the challenging situation. Indian AI researchers are rising to the occasion by suggesting newer ways of virus detection through novel screening methods powered by artificial intelligence.

• Deep Learning for Screening COVID-19 using Chest X-Ray Images: With the ever increasing demand for screening millions of prospective COVID-19 cases, and due to the emergence of high false negatives in the commonly used PCR tests, the necessity for probing an alternative simple screening mechanism of COVID-19 using radiological images (like chest X-Rays) assumes importance. In this scenario, machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) offer fast, automated, effective strategies to detect abnormalities and extract key features of the altered lung parenchyma, which may be related to specific signatures of the COVID-19 virus. However, the available COVID-19 datasets are inadequate to train deep neural networks. This research, therefore, proposes a new concept called Domain Extension Transfer Learning (DETL). The researchers have employed DETL, with pre-trained deep convolutional neural network, on a related large chest XRay dataset that is tuned for classifying between four classes viz. normal, pneumonia, other disease, and Covid-19. Read more...
• Multi-Task Driven Explainable Diagnosis of COVID-19 using Chest X-ray Images: X-rays are amongst the most popular, cheap, and widely available imaging technology across the world. This research posits an approach to detect the COVID-19 disease with chest x-ray images using a hierarchical approach. The first step is to segment and align the input image using a canonical form followed by classification and prediction. The classification pipeline is a two-stage pipeline in which the first step is to classify the healthy and unhealthy chest x-ray images. If the output result is unhealthy, the next step is to detect whether the chest x-ray images have symptoms of pneumonia or not. Read more...
• AI Based Intelligent COVID-19 detector Technology for Medical Assistance (ATMAN): The Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Developed at DRDO has developed an AI based intelligent, secure, web based, Covid detection application software. Known as ATMAN, this software uses input chest X-rays to classify them as normal, Covid-19 and Pneumonia classes using just a few hundred sample images. Virus affects the lungs early even before the patient starts showing significant symptoms. Thus, compared to RT-PCR test which takes many hours, an X-ray based diagnostic tool can detect the infection in early stages with processing time in seconds. The software is easy to navigate and can be easily accessed over Internet through a variety of devices like mobiles, tablets, laptops or computers. Read more...
• Rapid identification of Covid-19 biomarkers in blood plasma using Raman spectroscopy and artificial intelligence (by Indian Institute of Science Bangalore): Raman Spectroscopy is a non-destructive chemical analysis technique which is based upon the interaction of light with the chemical bonds within a material. Using AI and deep learning, the Covid-19 detection process will be automated and rapid and there will be no requirement of any extraction procedure or reagents. The only requirement is a spectrometer and the patient samples. Spectra collected from infected COVID-19 patients and healthy controls will be used for training and building robust classification models. Read more...

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