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. 2021;39(3-4):717-741.
doi: 10.1007/s00354-021-00128-0. Epub 2021 Jun 10.

Leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) Capabilities for COVID-19 Containment

Chellammal Surianarayanan  1 , Pethuru Raj Chelliah  2
Affiliations

Leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) Capabilities for COVID-19 Containment

Chellammal Surianarayanan et al. New Gener Comput. 2021.

Abstract

The Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by the newly discovered Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus two (SARS-CoV-2). Most of the people do not have the acquired immunity to fight this virus. There is no specific treatment or medicine to cure the disease. The effects of this disease appear to vary from individual to individual, right from mild cough, fever to respiratory disease. It also leads to mortality in many people. As the virus has a very rapid transmission rate, the entire world is in distress. The control and prevention of this disease has evolved as an urgent and critical issue to be addressed through technological solutions. The Healthcare industry therefore needs support from the domain of artificial intelligence (AI). AI has the inherent capability of imitating the human brain and assisting in decision-making support by automatically learning from input data. It can process huge amounts of data quickly without getting tiresome and making errors. AI technologies and tools significantly relieve the burden of healthcare professionals. In this paper, we review the critical role of AI in responding to different research challenges around the COVID-19 crisis. A sample implementation of a powerful probabilistic machine learning (ML) algorithm for assessment of risk levels of individuals is incorporated in this paper. Other pertinent application areas such as surveillance of people and hotspots, mortality prediction, diagnosis, prognostic assistance, drug repurposing and discovery of protein structure, and vaccine are presented. The paper also describes various challenges that are associated with the implementation of AI-based tools and solutions for practical use.

Keywords: Applications of AI; Artificial intelligence; COVID-19; Deep learning; Machine learning.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of interestOn behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest.

Figures

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Fig. 1
Potential applications of AI for COVID-19
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Role of AI in surveillance
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Higher level CNN-based deep learning for COVID-19 classification
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Timeline in conventional drug discovery
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Time line in drug repurposing
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A portion of biomedical knowledge graph
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Fig. 7
Different techniques of transfer learning
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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