How Coronavirus-Affected Regions Are Using AI to Combat Outbreak?

The mysterious coronavirus is spreading at an alarming rate. There are numerous victims affected from this in various regions across globe. Recently, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the coronavirus a global emergency. To put things into perspective, it has already exceeded the numbers infected during the 2002-2003 outbreak of SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) in China. Many countries are working hard to fight the virus. There have been quarantines, lock-downs on major cities, limits on travel and accelerated research on vaccine development.

Amid this, could technologies like artificial intelligence or AI help? Interestingly Yes! And it is already doing.

The San Francisco based venture-backed startup, BlueDot has built a sophisticated AI platform that processes billions of pieces of data, such as from the world's air travel network, to identity outbreaks. As noted by Forbes, in the case of the coronavirus, BlueDot made its first alert on December 31st. This was ahead of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which made its own determination on January 6th.

BlueDot is the mastermind of Kamran Khan, who is an infectious disease physician and professor of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Toronto. Moreover, he was a frontline healthcare worker during the SARS outbreak.

"We are currently using natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to process vast amounts of unstructured text data, currently in 65 languages, to track outbreaks of over 100 different diseases, every 15 minutes around the clock," said Khan. "If we did this work manually, we would probably need over a hundred people to do it well. These data analytics enable health experts to focus their time and energy on how to respond to infectious disease risks, rather than spending their time and energy gathering and organizing information."

According to Fortune, Insilico Medicine, a startup based in Rockville, Md., says it has used artificial intelligence to rapidly identify molecules that could form the basis of an effective treatment against the coronavirus at the heart of the current outbreak.

It took Insilico's AI-based system four days to identify thousands of new molecules that could be turned into potential medicines against the virus. Insilico says it will synthesize and test 100 of the most promising candidates, while publishing the full library of new molecular structures it has generated for other researchers to possibly use.

Moreover, John Brownstein, chief innovation officer at Harvard Medical School and an expert on mining social media information for health trends, is part of an international team using machine learning to comb through social media posts, news reports, data from official public health channels, and information supplied by doctors for warning signs the virus is taking hold in countries outside of China.

The program is looking for social media posts that mention specific symptoms, like respiratory problems and fever, from a geographic area where doctors have reported potential cases. Natural language processing is used to parse the text posted on social media, for example, to distinguish between someone discussing the news and someone complaining about how they feel.

"We are moving to surveillance efforts in the US," Brownstein says. It is critical to determine where the virus may surface if the authorities are to allocate resources and block its spread effectively. "We're trying to understand what's happening in the population at large," he says.

Furthermore, Andy Tatem, a professor at the UK's University of Southampton, and colleagues recently used anonymized historical data from smartphones, supplied by the Chinese search company Baidu, to model how the virus may have moved out of Wuhan in the days after it appeared.

Researchers at the British artificial intelligence startup Benevolent AI say they used the tech to search for existing approved drugs that might be helpful in limiting the virus's infection. Another set of scientists affiliated with Deargen, a drug discovery company based in South Korea, say that they used deep learning to find various available antiviral drugs that could be investigated as a potential treatment (that research has not yet been peer-reviewed).

Here's how Benevolent described its work: The company's researchers wanted to find an already-approved drug that could block the infection process. So they sent their AI looking for drugs, based on chemical properties that they knew the coronavirus to have, through a repository of an enormous amount of medical data, including scientific literature.

The system churned out a number of options, which were then whittled down to identify an already-approved drug called Baricitinib, which is typically used to treat moderate and severe rheumatoid arthritis. Now the researchers suggest it could be trialed as a potential treatment. Ivan Griffin, Benevolent's co-founder, told Recode that while the company hasn't applied for the right to test the drug in China, it has reached out to manufacturers that already produce the drug. It's unclear how long it might take before a properly tested drug reaches patients.

How China is Using AI to Combat Outbreak?

According to the Hindu, Beijing is turning to a familiar set of tools to find and prevent potential infections of coronavirus: data tracking and artificial intelligence. Several Chinese tech firms have developed apps to help people check if they have taken the same flight or train as confirmed virus patients, scraping data from lists published by state media. In Guangzhou, southern Guangdong province, robots at one public plaza have even been deployed to scold passers-by not wearing masks, according to state-run Global Times.

In Beijing, one neighbourhood committee responsible for an apartment complex of about 2,400 households said they used flight and train data to keep track of everyone's recent travel record.

"Use big data technology to track, screen priority (cases), and effectively forecast the development of the epidemic in real time," China's National Health Commission (NHC) told local governments in an online statement recently.

As Chinese authorities search for potential infections, a point of focus has been detecting fevers, a common symptom of the disease. While neighbourhoods and office buildings rely primarily on hand-held thermometers, public transport hubs are also trialling fever detection systems that use artificial intelligence and infrared cameras.