Chapter 12 AI in COVID-19 era, infodemic, and post-COVID-19 era
Yoshiki Oshida · 2021
Chapter 12 AI in COVID-19 era, infodemic, and post-COVID-19 era 12.1 With COVID-19 Healthcare delivery requires the support of new technologies like AI, IoT, big data, and AI/ML to fight and look ahead against the new diseases, and Vaishya et al. [1]reviewed the role of AI as a decisive technology to analyze, prepare us for prevention, and fight with COVID-19 and other pandemics.The rapid review of the literature is done on the database of Pubmed, Scopus, and Google Scholar using the keyword of COVID-19 or coronavirus (CoV) and AI.They collected the latest information regarding AI for COVID-19, then analyzed the same to identify its possible application for this disease.Seven important areas are listed to which AI technologies have been applied in COVID-19 pandemic [1].(1) For early detection and diagnosis of the infection, AI can quickly analyze irregular symptom and other "red flags" and thus alarm the patients and the healthcare authorities [2].It helps to provide faster decision-making, which is cost-effective.It helps to develop a new diagnosis and management system for the COVID-19 cases, through useful algorithms.AI is helpful in the diagnosis of the infected cases with the help of medical imaging technologies like CT and MRI scan of human body parts.(2) For monitoring the treatment, AI can build an intelligent platform for automatic monitoring and prediction of the spread of this virus.A neural network can also be developed to extract the visual features of this disease, and this would help in proper monitoring and treatment of the affected individuals [3,4].It has the capability of providing day-to-day updates of the patients and also to provide solutions to be followed in COVID-19 pandemic.(3) For contact tracing of the individuals, AI can help analyze the level of infection by this virus by identifying the clusters and "hot spots" and can successfully do the contact tracing of the individuals and also to monitor them.It can predict the future course of this disease and likely reappearance.(4) For projection of cases and mortality, AI technology can track and forecast the nature of the virus from the available data, social media, and media platforms, about the risks of the infection and its likely spread.Further, it can predict the number of positive cases and death in any region.AI can help identify the most vulnerable regions, people, and countries and take measures accordingly.(5) For development of drugs and vaccines, AI is used for drug research by analyzing the available data on COVID-19.It is useful for drug delivery design and development.This technology is used in speeding up drug testing in real-time, where standard testing takes plenty of time and hence helps to accelerate this process significantly, which may not be possible by a human [2].It can help to identify useful drugs for the treatment of COVID-19