How AI Can Play a Role in Tackling the COVID-19 Pandemic?
The global healthcare industry faced the most significant health challenge in 2020. To protect ourselves against the novel COVID-19 virus and lower the overall disruption many AI companies started to develop new tools to overcome this difficulty. Here are some keyways that prove how AI is essential in tackling COVID-19.
- Containing the Spread:
AI can be harnessed in forecasting the spread of the virus by developing an early warning system. The one thing that AI excels in is analysing and uncovering patterns in vast data swathes. This is precisely what makes AI the perfect tool for modelling and tracking the distribution of the virus. Facebook gives an example of how this ability was utilized in practice; the AI works by sharing anonymized data about people’s movement through mapping software, which enabled Facebook to generate accurate population density estimates that offer a clear picture of when and where people were congregating. Hence, such tools are useful for tracking the virus’s spread and allocating medical resources more efficiently.
- Diagnosing the Virus:
First, to control the virus effectively, we need to know who has already overcome the infection, who has it, and who has never been infected. Hence, many companies tackled this challenge by launching the Coronavirus AI solution, which helps clinicians detect and monitor the virus. It even lowers the medical practitioners’ burden by allowing them to locate the virus on images of the patient’s lung, based on the data derived from the vital statistics. AI provides essential information for resource allocation by prioritizing the need for ventilators and respiratory supports in the Intensive care unit.
- Drug Development:
Never has mankind witnessed such a race for developing a vaccine against a pathogen or virus. Vaccine development can be a laborious and lengthy process, mainly due to the human immune system’s complexity and its variability among different groups and people. The pace of the discovery can be enhanced manifold by witnessing the power of AI. Entities have leveraged AI platforms, genomics, computing, system biology, and bioinformatics, as these technologies can anticipate where the disease will go next and identify drugs that will be effective against COVID-19.
Way Forward:
Soon, AI will play a significant role in the pharma industry to explore the healthcare sector’s unmet medical needs. In collaboration with AI companies, many pharma companies can develop cloud-based AI platforms to accelerate their drug discovery programs. These platforms will look for patterns in data and use algorithms to make accurate predictions about the potential drug molecules based on computational structure analysis, drug target, and data from in-vivo cell line studies. Hence, it shows that AI has a massive Pharmaceutical industry application in the coming years.
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