While the numbers of coronaviruses and new cases continue to rise worldwide, medical scientists and engineers are actively designing testing kits and vaccines for pandemic control.
In order to aid diagnosis of coronavirus against the shortage of test kits, two students from Pakistan have joined forces and developed a method to artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor the virus.
Mohammad Aleem and his colleague, Rahul Raj, both final year students at Gulam Ishaq Khan Institute (GIKI), turned to technology to help Pakistan battle the virus.
“As the virus is still growing exponentially and our hospitals are already overwhelmed, we decided to turn to artificial intelligence to help promptly identify cases in the absence of testing kits”, Aleem told Gulf News.
“The AI-powered deep learning model that we have developed from scratch can help detect COVID-19 with 92% confidence using computed tomography (CT) scan of lungs,” he said.
“The detector relies on the chest CT imaging. If the CT scans are available then it would hardly take 10-20 seconds to perform the analysis and find out if the patient is COVID-19 positive,” explains Raj.
This makes the process of detection less time consuming and requires little human interaction.
“We immediately need more CT scans of coronavirus patients to improve the detector’s accuracy and begin testing.”
Both developers are hoping that with government assistance they will be able to expand their research and help save Pakistan from this crisis.
