Pandemic like the ongoing coronavirus outbreak which has no previous recorded information about how it’s being created has ended up being a great challenge for the government and healthcare officials to collect information and find a way to eradicate it permanently. This hinders the efforts to prevent and rapidly respond to the virus attack and increases the term of the spread. This is where artificial intelligence (AI) plays a crucial role in foreseeing an outbreak, limiting it’s spread and aid researchers fight such pandemics in the future.
Data is pivotal for AI to develop potential medicines for diseases. Currently, the biggest challenge is the availability of past COVID data or any data that is similar. AI identifies possible drug compounds by using generative design algorithms which produce a wide range of prospective results and further culminate the ones worth looking for attentively. There are various AI projects where scientists are closely studying AI as a diagnostic tool. Not only the drug data but other data like news reports, internet, and social media contents are also important to forecast a virus outbreak. Researchers are being able to detect the initial COVID outbreak stages with the content available on the internet and social media channels.
COVID outbreak has accelerated various AI applications to search for a cure. It might be a bit late now for the current AI technology to completely eradicate the current COVID outbreak but with the huge advancements in AI, there’s hope any outbreaks in the future will be better handled. Tech companies have already started researching other potential AI applications to mine all the outbreak information and train their AI with accurate information in order to unfold any future pandemic beforehand. As artificial intelligence can find connections and patterns through big data, it makes it easier to determine what kind of treatments or experiments could yield results. When compared to the initial outbreak, data now are immediately available which is helping AI in a greater way as some researchers are able to produce the genomic sequence of the new virus. This will help future scientists to do such studies and trials with increasingly precise and fast outcomes. The role of artificial intelligence in treating pandemics and other healthcare challenges is just set to develop.
Significantly, the key AI elements that will majorly help in epidemics prevention is its speed and range. AI can instantly detect any anomalies which are incredible when attempting to prevent epidemics. Humans cannot efficiently detect conditions from this volume of data with much speed. AI can be trained with a wide range of available data as it can extract information from them simultaneously. Artificial intelligence is all set to turn into a firewall against deadly diseases and epidemics. This is possible because AI can not only screen and detect the conditions but also identify potential vaccines and treatments for next COVID or any similar diseases.
This treatment revelation will prove essentially significant later on. What’s more, in terms of screening, AI will get one of the essential ingredients in guaranteeing that another COVID wouldn’t affect the worldwide economy. COVID-19 coronavirus is likely to cut global GDP growth by $1.1 trillion this year, in addition to having already wiped around $5 trillion off the value of global stock markets (Source: Forbes).
Artificial intelligence algorithms are as of now developing drugs for the known diseases and this technique can be utilized to identify new anti-infection compounds that could execute any similar viruses or bacteria in the future. It will lessen the time taken by scientists to do research on new, unknown infections and their possible medications from scratch during the future outbreaks. To be successful, AI-based medication engineers would need to prepare for the time, choosing an infection genome prone to cause problems in the future and focusing on it when there are hardly any motivators to do as such.