Artificial Intelligence May Help in the Fight Against COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic took the world by storm in early 2020 and has become since then the leading cause of death in several countries, including China, USA, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Researchers are working extensively on developing practical ways to diagnose COVID-19 infections, and many of them have focused their attention on how artificial intelligence (AI) could be leveraged for this purpose. Several studies have reported that AI-based systems can be used to detect COVID-19 in chest X-ray images because the disease tends to produce areas with pus and water in the lungs, which show up as white spots in the X-ray scans. Although various diagnostic AI models based on this principle have been proposed, improving their accuracy, speed, and applicability remains a top priority. Now, a team of scientists led by Professor Gwanggil Jeon of Incheon National University, Korea, has developed an automatic COVID-19 diagnosis framework that turns things up a notch by combining two powerful AI-based techniques.