How AI (artificial intelligence) fight against the coronavirus ?

How to fight the coronavirus with AI? On February 13, in China, two hospitals in Wuhan and another in Shanghai received unexpected reinforcement in their fight against the Covid-19 coronavirus. Several robots from CloudMinds Technology have been delivered to them. Connected in 5G to an “intelligent cloud”, the equivalent of a remote brain in which algorithms mill millions of data, these different devices disinfect rooms, deliver medicines, answer patients’ questions and take their temperature. “They can act in place of medical teams in quarantine areas, and perform simple follow-up tasks, which reduces the risk of exposure,” said Bill Huang, CEO of CloudMinds Technology, in a statement.

If the current Covid-19 crisis is more serious than that of the previous coronavirus, SARS, which killed nearly 800 people 17 years ago, scientists have a new tool with countless applications to combat it: artificial intelligence (AI). Able to find solutions in record time from large databases, AI programs are tested at all levels of the fight against the epidemic, from the detection of foci of contagion to the search for treatments, in going through medical diagnosis.

In China, a leading country in this area, the giants “Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu, ZTE, iFLYTEK, and JD. com all use big data, artificial intelligence and 5G for long-distance diagnosis, screening and medical services, ”said a recent report by the Shanghai Institute for International Studies, a Chinese public think tank.

A new smart tool against the epidemic

But it is all over the world that scientists and computer scientists are leading this race against the clock. As of December 31, the Canadian start-up BlueDot was the first to detect the start of the epidemic in Wuhan, China, nine days before the announcement of the World Health Organization. Its technology constantly scans official reports, professional forums, articles and keywords typed in search engines to detect, in 65 languages, the terms suggesting the spread of a virus. When disturbing signals appear, epidemiologists confirm the analysis, before alerting the company’s public and private customers.

Coronavirus: AI predicted epidemic

At Harvard University School of Medicine in the United States, a research team is using a similar technique to publish a world map on the Health Map site to track the spread of the virus in real time. For this, their algorithm scans social networks for comments from Internet users who mention a fever or other symptoms, and devours information sites and public health data. By taking the temperature of the Web, it detects the probable cases of contamination everywhere on the planet, even before the national authorities made the announcement. Useful in less transparent countries.

Detect, map, diagnose and smart treat

Computer researchers at NorthEastern University in Boston, in the United States, have gone a step further by developing a predictive model, EpiRisk, which estimates the probabilities of dissemination of the coronavirus based on air transport figures, crossed with those of travel. daily from residents of 78,000 regions on five continents. Their map reveals, for example, that France was only the fourth country where the risk of importing the virus from Italy was the greatest, behind Spain, the United Kingdom and Germany, which do not share no border with the Peninsula.

On the ground too, AI works miracles. In late January, engineers from InferVision, a Beijing-based company specializing in cancer diagnostics, urgently developed an algorithm that recognizes, in a minute, the characteristic lesions of Covid-19 on a lung scanner. It can also estimate the course of the infection. “This allows doctors to quickly place patients in quarantine before performing additional exams,” said SunYipeng, European director of InferVision. The risk of contamination in the hospital is thus limited. Since the installation of the device in ten Chinese establishments, more than 50,000 scanners have been reviewed by the program.

A precious help for local radiologists, overwhelmed. Even on the street, the Chinese are sifted through AI without knowing it. Baidu researchers have developed a tool capable of identifying, on the images of public cameras, people who do not wear their protective mask, an obligation in certain provinces.The company also helped install infrared body temperature scanners in the Beijing Metro.

Once the patients are detected, it is still necessary to treat them. Thanks to their almost unlimited comparison capabilities, the algorithms considerably speed up the search for treatments. Allied with Imperial College London, the English start-up BenevolentAI crossed the known chemical properties of the virus with those of products already authorized to fight against other pathologies. The tool was able to identify a remedy for arthritis, baricitinib, as potentially capable of blocking viral infection of lung cells. It only remains to try it.

Seven molecules about to be synthesized

Other scientists are banking on AI to create new drugs. Using the structure of Covid-19 published by a Chinese scientist, the Insilico Medicine company in Maryland gave its algorithm the task of imagining molecules capable of inhibiting the virus at the end of January. “We have generated more than 100,000 structures, then used different forms of AI to filter out bad ones, based on their effectiveness, safety, side effects …” lists the founder, Alex Zhavoronkov.

Four days later, a list of 100 candidate molecules was established and published on the Internet, to collect the opinions of the scientific community. Based on the comments, the company has selected seven, which should be summarized in the coming weeks. “AI is more efficient than biochemists by its speed and the quality of the molecules developed,” said the CEO of Insilico Medicine. We can take into account up to 32 parameters to produce structures, while a chemist can only consider two or three. AI becomes more creative than humans. ”

The technology developed by this entrepreneur was selected on February 26 by MIT, one of the best scientific universities in the world, among the ten “revolutionary innovations” of 2020. “This epidemic is giving a big boost to the artificial intelligence, concludes Alex Zhavoronkov. During the Second World War, many inventions were born and remained after war. It’s a bit the same with coronavirus: when it’s finished, the technology will stay. ”

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