Artificial Intelligence and the Fight Against COVID-19

Although there has been rapid growth in the levels of AI research to tackle COVID-19 since the beginning of the year, AI remains underrepresented in this area compared to its presence in research outside of COVID-19. After growing rapidly earlier in the year, the share of AI papers in COVID-19 research has stagnated in recent weeks. More than a third of publications to tackle COVID-19 involve predictive analyses of patient data and in particular medical scans. AI is also being deployed to analyse social media data, predict the spread of the disease and develop biomedical applications. China, the US, the UK, India and Canada are the global leaders in the development of AI applications to tackle COVID-19 research, accounting for 62 per cent of the institutional participations for which we have geographical data.