How AI Can Predict the Spread of Coronavirus and Other Serious Diseases
But while these medical facilities attempt to deal with this new strain of Coronavirus, they can take comfort in knowing that artificial intelligence (AI) systems are currently being developed and optimized to be able to better predict the spread of the Coronavirus and other deadly diseases.
How Coronavirus Was Flagged By AI
The sooner that medical professionals can become aware of serious diseases, the sooner that they can begin to take steps to better prepare themselves in order to handle it. That is why it is so crucial to have systems like BlueDot’s, which used its AI system to identify Coronavirus as a lingering health crisis over a week before the World Health Organization (WHO) alerted the public about the new strain of the disease.
Its natural language processing and machine learning algorithm was able to do so by automatically reading through over 100,000 articles every single day. Therefore, it becomes aware of a potential disease outbreak when it is still in its very early stages. In fact, the system is able to accurately track over 100 infectious diseases simultaneously, one of which happened to be the new strain of Coronavirus.
Even once the disease was publicly acknowledged as a health crisis, AI systems continue to be used in order to predict how it is going to spread. The perfect example of this is the Healthmap system, which automatically aggregates data from various chat rooms, news reports, and many other online sources in order to create a current database of confirmed cases of various diseases. It is then able to generate a visual map representing how the diseases have spread from the beginning and how they are likely to continue to spread.
Not only that, AI algorithms are also helping to identify early signs of hemodynamic instability, a common COVID-19 complication.
How AI Will Be Used in the Future to Predict Serious Diseases
It is not just the Coronavirus that AI systems can be used to predict. They are also able to be applied to nearly every type of serious disease as long as they are given the right data to be trained with, which is where initiatives like the Global Virome Project come in handy.
This research effort is attempting to develop a very detailed ecological and genetic database of current animal viruses that could possibly infect humans. By having this information readily available, it can be provided to new and current AI algorithms to help them better predict which diseases are more likely to spread to the public.
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