Algorithms can help fight COVID-19. But at what cost?

This past spring, as billions of people languished at home under lockdown and stared at gloomy graphs, Linda Wang and Alexander Wong, scientists at DarwinAI, a Canadian startup that works in the field of artificial intelligence, took advantage of their enforced break: In collaboration with the University of Waterloo, they helped develop a tool to detect COVID-19 infection by means of X-rays. Using a database of thousands of images of lungs, COVID-Net – as they called the open-access artificial neural network – can detect with 91 percent certainty who is ill with the virus. In the past, we would undoubtedly have been suspicious of, or at least surprised by, a young company (DarwinAI was established in 2018) with no connection to radiology, having devised such an ambitious tool within mere weeks. But these days, we know it can be done. Networks that draw on an analysis of visual data using a technique known as "deep learning" can, with relative flexibility, adapt themselves to decipher any type of image and provide results that often surpass those obtained by expert radiologists.