Artificial Intelligence in Pandemics

  • Disease surveillance: Human activity -especially migration- has been responsible for the spread of the virus around the world.
    • In the near and distant future, technology like this may be used to predict zoonotic infection risk to humans considering variables such as climate change and human activity.
    • The combined analysis of personal, clinical, travel and social data including family history and lifestyle habits obtained from sources like social media would enable more accurate and precise predictions of individual risk profiles and healthcare results.
  • Predicting Outbreaks: On December 30, an artificial-intelligence company called BlueDot, which uses machine learning to monitor outbreaks of infectious diseases around the world, alerted clients—including various governments, hospitals, and businesses—to an unusual bump in pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China.
    • An automated service called HealthMap at Boston Children’s Hospital also caught those first signs. As did a model run by Metabiota, based in San Francisco. That AI could spot an outbreak on the other side of the world is significant, and early warnings save lives.
    • It would be another nine days before the World Health Organization officially flagged what we’ve all come to know as Covid-19.
  • Early Diagnosis: AI has a proven track record here. Machine-learning models for examining medical images can catch early signs of disease that human doctors miss, from eye disease to heart conditions to cancer. But these models typically require a lot of data to learn from.
  • Automatic temperature measurement: Automated camera systems used in conjunction with thermal sensors and vision algorithms on autonomous or remotely operated robots could be used to monitor temperatures of patients in hospitals.
    • Example: In the United States, a surveillance company announced that its AI-enhanced thermal cameras can detect fevers, while in Thailand, border officers at airports are already piloting a biometric screening system using fever-detecting cameras.
  • Virtual healthcare assistants: The number of COVID-19 cases has shown that healthcare systems and response measures can be overwhelmed. Canada-based Stallion.
    • AI has leveraged its natural language processing capabilities to build a multi-lingual virtual healthcare agent that can answer questions related to COVID-19, provide reliable information and clear guidelines, recommend protection measures, check and monitor symptoms, and advise individuals whether they need hospital screening or self-isolation at their homes.
  • Intelligent drones and robots: The public deployment of drones and robots has been accelerated due to the strict social distancing measures required to contain the virus’ spread.
    • To ensure compliance, some drones are used to track individuals not using facemasks in public, while others are used to broadcast information to larger audiences and also disinfect public spaces.
  • Curative reasearch: Part of what has troubled the scientific community is the absence of a definitive cure for the virus.
    • AI can lead the charge for the development of antibodies and vaccines for the novel coronavirus, either entirely designed from scratch or through drug repurposing.
    • For instance, using its AlphaFold system, Google’s AI company, DeepMind, is creating structure models of proteins that have been linked with the virus in a bid to aid the science world’s comprehension of the virus.
    • Although the results have not been experimentally verified, it represents a step in the right direction.