Artificial intelligence applications used in the clinical response to COVID-19: A scoping review

Author summary In this study we describe the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the clinical response to COVID-19. AI has been variously predicted to play a key role during the pandemic or has been reported to have had little or no impact on patient care. Our findings support a balanced view. We identified 66 applications—specific AI products or tools—used in a variety of ways to diagnose, guide treatment, or prioritize patients during the pandemic response. Many were deployed early in 2020 and most were used in the U.S., other high-income countries, or China. Some were used to care for hundreds of thousands of patients though most were adopted at smaller scales. We found evaluation studies that supported the use of 39 of these applications, though few of these evaluations were written by independent authors, not affiliated with application developers. We found no clinical trials that evaluated the effect of using an AI application on patient health outcomes. Future research is needed to better understand the impact of using AI in clinical care.