Leveraging Artifcial Intelligence (AI) Capabilities for COVID‑19 Containment

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 fght this virus. There is no specifc treatment or medicine to cure the disease. The efects 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 techno logical solutions. The Healthcare industry therefore needs support from the domain of artifcial 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 mak ing errors. AI technologies and tools signifcantly relieve the burden of healthcare professionals. In this paper, we review the critical role of AI in responding to dif ferent 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, prog nostic 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.