Artificial Intelligence in Surveillance, Diagnosis, Drug Discovery and Vaccine Development against COVID-19

Abstract

As of August 6th, 2021, the World Health Organization has notified 200.8 million laboratory-confirmed infections and 4.26 million deaths from COVID-19, making it the worst pandemic since the 1918 flu. The main challenges in mitigating COVID-19 are effective vaccination, treatment, and agile containment strategies. In this review, we focus on the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in COVID-19 surveillance, diagnosis, outcome prediction, drug discovery and vaccine development. With the help of big data, AI tries to mimic the cognitive capabilities of a human brain, such as problem-solving and learning abilities. Machine Learning (ML), a subset of AI, holds special promise for solving problems based on experiences gained from the curated data. Advances in AI methods have created an unprecedented opportunity for building agile surveillance systems using the deluge of real-time data generated within a short span of time. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many reports have discussed the utility of AI approaches in prioritization, delivery, surveillance, and supply chain of drugs, vaccines, and non-pharmaceutical interventions. This review will discuss the clinical utility of AI-based models and will also discuss limitations and challenges faced by AI systems, such as model generalizability, explainability, and trust as pillars for real-life deployment in healthcare.

Keywords: COVID-19; SARS-CoV-2; artificial intelligence; diagnosis; drug discovery; machine learning; pandemic; prediction; surveillance; vaccine.

Figure 1

The application of Artificial Intelligence in handling COVID-19 pandemic. The life cycle of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 disease etiology is shown on the left panel. On the right, examples of different applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are shown. AI-related tools can be useful in the accurate diagnosis of COVID-19 disease, finding new drugs, and analysis of data from clinical trials.

Figure 2

The role of AI tools in the COVID-19 pandemic. (A) The illustration depicts applications of ML and other AI tools in curated datasets from different paradigms to address the challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. (B) An overview of existing AI techniques.