Health workers are at the forefront of fighting epidemics like the current COVID-19, and endanger their own lives to save others. However, behind the lines, the battle must be waged by authorities, medical scientists, statistics, and computer scientists using an array of artificial intelligence (AI) and technology for data science.

What can AI do in such conditions?

The World Health Organization and officials from other countries can respond quicker under such circumstances with AI based alert systems.

• AI as infection-path predictor

AI can also be used to predict how an epidemic can spread, and how strategies like “social distancing” can curtail, or even decrease, their frequency. In theory, it may be possible to perform uncontrolled learning algorithms that simulate the evolution of all potential trajectories and experiment with how well potential vaccines perform in each scenario.

• AI enabled temperature detection

AI-enabled temperature detection solutions work using body tracking, and face and double sensing using infrared cameras and visible light. It can help people working in high-density traffic movement sites, such as subway, bus, and railway stations and airports, to easily identify people who may have high body temperatures. It will allow workers to complete all body temperature check-ups without close physical contact and therefore can reduce possible physical viral transmission.

• AI as force multiplier

As a force-multiplier for pandemics, AI technologies could definitely aid the support of medical decision-making methods for matching and triaging patients, resulting in faster diagnosis. Some companies are already using image analytics that can rapidly diagnose infection from chest CT scans. Remote TV robots can be used more than ever to give people in enforced medical quarantines virtual mobility and solace. Similarly, robots can be used to clean spaces to reduce physical contact.

• AI as diagnostic instrument

AI can investigate the early signs of several diseases that human doctors may miss on medical images. With the absence of much training data, techniques like few-shot learning and transfer learning may be used to train AI models to search for pandemics, but these methods appear to be largely untested for the present outbreak.

• AI detection technologies for tracking

We live in a time where, through our everyday lives and experiences, we continuously leave digital footprints. These huge data troves can be analyzed using AI to identify contact tracing and infection clusters, spread patterns, and high-risk patients.

• AI as defender of fake news

AI technologies have always been proponents against fake news. In the sense of this pandemic, our incomplete knowledge and anxiety have created a flood of faulty or misleading information about how well meaning people cope with an epidemic. AI technology can assist in flagging questions and pointing towards trustworthy sources of knowledge.

• AI as an early warning system

AI can be used as an early warning system. AI helps epidemiologists to identify emerging outbreaks as well as to predict how they can spread from one region to another and even from one population group to another. For instance, companies are using AI solution for tracking infectious disease outbreaks worldwide.

Conclusion

AI is tackling many problems posed by the present COVID-19 pandemic of coronavirus. It has proved to be an invaluable instrument for anticipating the start of the pandemic. It has forecast when, where, how and at what pace it is likely to spread and grow. Notably, it has also assessed its frequency and intensity.