DarwinAI wants to help identify coronavirus in X-rays, but radiologists aren't convinced

Canadian startup DarwinAI and researchers from the University of Waterloo are open-sourcing COVID-Net, a convolutional neural network that aims to detect COVID-19 in X-ray imagery. In response to the pandemic, a global community of health care and AI researchers have produced a number of AI systems for identifying COVID-19 in CT scans. Companies like Alibaba and AI startups RadLogics and Lunit claim they've created systems capable of recognizing COVID-19 in X-ray or CT scans with more than 90% accuracy. Early work from Chinese medical researchers and a system published in the journal Radiology last week demonstrated similar results. Like other companies making AI to detect COVID-19 from chest X-rays, DarwinAI said it's creating COVID-Net and the accompanying COVIDx data set to give doctors a way to quickly triage and screen potential cases.