Artificial Intelligence and abstruse Covid 19

Several Sino groups say they've developed artificial intelligence systems that can detect coronavirus infections in seconds — far faster than human doctors.

To minimize the spread of COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the covid 19 SARS-CoV-2, health officials need to be able to quickly tell whether or not a patient is infected.

As the outbreak has spread, researchers have scrambled to develop new diagnostics tests for the disease, including kits doctors can use to identify the virus from cheek swabs.

However, those kits still aren't widely available, and currently, the best way for doctors to detect coronavirus infections is through CT scans (incredibly detailed 3D X-rays).

The problem with CT scans is that a doctor has to analyze them for signs of covid 19. That can take up to 20 minutes, as some CT scans will include more than 300 images.

Beijing startup Infervision is also helping speed up the detection of coronavirus infections in China, but it didn't need to develop an AI from scratch to do so.

Instead, it modified one it had already released for the detection of cancer and pneumonia in CT scans. Health officials have already used that system to review more than 32,000 cases at 34 hospitals

Doctors no longer need to engage in the lengthy process of manually reading images one by one to identify high risk cases, while coronavirus-probable patients wait around the hospital posing a severe risk of infecting other patients and hospital staff," 

AI Startup Infervision says the system needs just 10 seconds to detect coronavirus, but doesn't note how accurate it is. Still, chances are all of these algorithms will only get better with time.

"As more and more scans are done, then the algorithm learns and improves accuracy together with the virus," virologist Velislava Petrova, who wasn't involved in the creation of any of the above AIs, told The Lancet.