The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the entire world to a stalemate situation. It has claimed several hundred thousand lives across and lowered the businesses on their knees across the globe. Our front-line warriors including healthcare professionals, government servants, and support staff are working relentlessly to soothe our plights. In these tough times, artificial intelligence has shown a remarkable potential to curb the trajectory of the pandemic and help us sail through it successfully.
The power of AI technologies has proved instrumental in deriving effective solutions and leads in various domains at different stages of the pandemic. The current experience has evidenced the role of AI from assisting medical professionals to aiding researchers and scientists in battling such global crises. This experience has cemented that the technology can remarkably enhance our capabilities and preparedness to deal with future pandemics. It can delegate tremendous strength and competence to create a world that is ready for any such situation. Armed with AI technologies and AI-enabled tools we can ascertain our win while combating the pandemics of tomorrow.
√ Tracking automation and prediction
Pandemics can be well managed and impeded if these are recognized and acknowledged in the early stages. Tracking the information available on various platforms such as social media, news reports, and channels, reports from medical institutes, etc is crucial in predicting a pandemic. It can also help identify the intensity and impact on various regions to initiate rapid actions in curbing its influence.
AI technologies such as machine learning and natural language processing have already made a mark in processing enormous data from a vast range of platforms. It can work in collaboration with analytics solutions to dig deep into the data and unearth vital insights that were otherwise concealed in the data silos. These technologies can significantly work on geographic, and demographic to create interactive real-time health maps to curb the spread of the pandemics. If fed with a multitude and multimodal data, AI can also be employed in predicting the outbreak
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√ Rapid contact tracing
One of the biggest mountains to conquer while fighting a pandemic is rapid contact tracing. It is also the most crucial aspect in delivering effective healthcare, identifying the impact, and allocation and assessing the availability of resources. Mobile applications have proven to be of great help during the current COVID-19 pandemic. However, developments and technological researches have concluded that the amalgamation of AI with such applications can boost our ability to counter pandemics up by multiple notches.
Augmenting AI technologies with mobile applications running on smartphones, smartwatches, cameras, and myriad electronic wearable devices. This combination can yield real-time information that can be employed to streamline effective contact tracing and monitoring of the spread of pandemics. AI support can remarkably enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of testing campaigns and identify contractions early to initiate immediate actions.
√ Monitoring contracted patients
The biggest challenge for the healthcare professionals and medical teams is to delegate treatment to the contracted people while staying safe. They have put your lives at stake to monitor the patients and provide medical care. Also, medical staff is the most vital resource in such situations which is why it is imperative to keep them safe to ensure successful sail through pandemics.
AI can play a significant role in identifying the best possible course of treatment and monitoring the patients in clinical settings. It also provides crucial information about resource availability in the allocation of intensive care units, ventilators, and other reserves. AI technologies can capture real-time updates, analyze them and deliver insights about chances of recovery and mortality to streamline the treatment courses.
√ Controlling the spread of pandemic by reducing human interactions
The best way to stay together during a pandemic is to stay apart from each other. AI provides us the means to achieve social distancing in the most effective way. AI-based automation of intelligent machines, tools, and applications is being the key driver of our daily lives, office works, and businesses even in times of pandemics. It serves as a great to keep the ball rolling and prevent interruptions in world economies.
AI technologies can also prevent the spread of the disease by enabling medical professionals to take care and treat the infected patients with minimum possible interactions with them. The use of intelligent bots and RPA solutions can eliminate the need for human interaction from various tasks. These smart machines can be used to deliver medicines and food to the patients in isolation reducing the likelihood of the spread of the disease.
√ Enhanced early diagnosis
In the current coronavirus pandemic, AI is used in the detection and quantifying the cases to an appreciable extent using the analytics of ct-scan and x-ray images. Colossal numbers of volumetric chest x-ray images in both 2D and 3D are used to create a deep learning model that could differentiate between community-contracted pneumonia and COVID-19 patients.
This has laid the foundation of many advanced learning models that can be developed in the future by feeding AI-based solutions with large datasets to extract deeper insight into the disease. Such models fuel the early and accurate detection of the infection and help save many lives with proper treatment.
√ Lightening the shoulders of medical and healthcare professionals
Medical and healthcare professionals work at the war level to battle the pandemics and save as many lives as humanly possible. AI comes to the aid of these warriors and offers assistance that can take a significant burden off their shoulders. They can remotely monitor the severeness of the symptoms, digital reports, and study the patterns to identify and provide the best course of treatment to the patients.
AI technologies also help in providing telemedicine to asymptomatic patients or patients with mild symptoms and treat them with zero interactions. Chatbots can be used to provide automatic assistance and consultation facilities to such patients. Machine learning algorithms offer tremendous pace and precision to the prognosis analysis. Similar solutions can be used to predict the possibility of the development of severe syndromes in different cases with the least intervention from doctors thereby reducing the hospital crowd.
√ Faster and precise protein structure prediction
What makes a pandemic a massive threat is its rapid spread and unavailability of proper drugs for its treatment. AI can lend a helping hand in quickly identifying the protein structures that are crucial for the entry of viruses into the human body. These structures are also critical in understanding the replication nature of the virus that makes the disease more intense.
AI technologies such as deep residual networks and neural networks play an instrumental role in gaining an understanding of the complex protein structure and amino acid sequences. These technologies give a massive push to drug discovery programs and help the development of effective medication in a very short period.
√ Development of therapeutics
AI plays a significant role in helping the world to heal and recover from a widespread pandemic. It can be used to complement and enhance the traditional technologies that accelerate the drugs from bench to bed. It enables the researchers and scientists to conduct virtual screening at a much higher pace which boosts the lead discovery and validation process to a great margin.
AI technologies can also be deployed for drug repositioning and drug repurposing. It can quickly analyze the screening properties of the drugs that are already approved by scrutinizing their molecular properties and descriptors. This is a huge push in the discovery of an effective treatment that is not possible by only relying on human expertise.
√ Rapid vaccine development
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the world has witnessed an unprecedented race to find a vaccine that can combat these lethal pathogens. With our experience of the past few months, we can clearly endorse the ability of AI technologies in assisting and accelerating the discovery of the vaccine.
By harnessing the power of AI, researchers are able to derive a reverse vaccinology learning platform that guides vaccine discovery through supervised classification models of machine learning. Deploying neural networks and neural language processing propels enables the analysis of thousands of research papers from scientists across the world at an unparalleled pace. Such literature-based discoveries serve as a vital tool in finding and validating potential vaccines to curb the pandemic.
√ Extensive growth in genome
In recent times, we have seen the incredible potential that can be harnessed by combining the power of advanced technologies with medical science and practices. During coronavirus pandemic scientists in the different covers of the world capitalize on the capabilities of AI technologies such as neural networks, deep learning, and machine learning models to understand and recreate genome sequence for coronavirus in just a few weeks.
Scientists could also quickly and precisely classify the SARS-COV-2 genomes by feeding the known genomic signatures to artificial neural networks and machine learning. The technology has shown great potential in evaluating and predicting side-effects of vaccines and medicinal drugs. These capabilities have given hope and encouragement in handling future pandemics.
√ Take away
It is apparent from the past and recent experiences that there is no silver bullet to combat diseases. However, technologies are paving the way to develop resilience and a robust society. AI is bestowing great might to mankind to withstand and combat large breakouts efficiently. AI technologies can be used to establish a model to prevent pandemics and slash down the impact in future occurrences. It also delegates enormous capabilities in surveillance and monitoring and development and delegation of treatments that boost our preparedness to face the upcoming pandemics.
