During the coronavirus crisis, doctors and healthcare workers are giving absolutely everything in India’s fight against the epidemic which has claimed 1,223 lives in the country and more than two lakh lives globally. There are 37,776 confirmed cases of coronavirus and 10,018 people have recovered from the deadly outbreak.
Without even caring about their lives, doctors and healthcare workers are working all day without taking as rest to save people’s lives. There are absolutely no words to explain their dedication to work.
Besides doctors, health care workers, researchers around the world also deserve our praises as they are trying to determine smart and effective ways to detect COVID-19.
It is cognisance of the fact that swab tests are uncomfortable while also being time-consuming as it takes hours for the results to be officially unveiled.
However, in good news, an Indian researcher has found a new technique to detect COVID-19 within 5 seconds from an X-Ray scan. Yes, you read it right.
Professor Kamal Jain from IIT Roorkee developed a coronavirus test that uses the brilliance of AI in order to detect the novel coronavirus from an x-ray in just three to five seconds.
Kamal claims to have used data over 60,000 chest x-rays (sourced from NIH Clinical Centre in the US) to train the AI for detecting the novel coronavirus. It is to be noted that AI detects the presence of coronavirus examining the levels of chest congestion.
He said in a statement, “The usual cause of death in the sample cases I have analysed was severe pneumonia. Most types of pneumonia we know of, for which patients need hospitalisation, are bacterial in origin, and respond to antibiotics. Pneumonia caused by COVID-19 is particularly severe, and tends to affect all of the lungs, instead of small parts.”
He added, “Identifying bilateral opacities, the pattern of fluid build-up in lungs, nature of clumps and its overall arrangement is the main source of identification, but it takes time and experience for physicians who know how to look at the data. But with our AI-based app, we can quantitatively classify such patterns in no time, and that too for thousands of patients.”
Professor went on to hint that AI not only detects the presence of COVID-19, but also shows the severity of the case. The AI system also indicates the doctors just in case the patient might require special attention.
The professor said: “The main advantage of this app is that it is able to process lakhs of x-ray images in a matter of minutes, and classify a patient according to the level of coronal infection, to help hospital administration decide which patient needs to be put on ventilator first.”
He added, “Thus, with this app, we can not only identify which patient is corona-infected, but also determine the severity of infection with visualisation of those parts of the lungs that are infected, and add a level of smart management by automatically arranging patients who need to be ventilated in a queue.”
From what we can come to a firm conclusion is that the AI system seems to be the smartest method that could help many people but it is yet to be sanctioned by Indian Council of Medical Research as of now.