Prediction: Health surveillance companies spotted Covid-19 in late December by parsing news reports, social media, and official statements, but predicting how the epidemic will spread is harder. AI companies could do more if they were allowed access to patient records, but that would require working through thorny privacy issues. The U.S. recently finalized new rules for giving patients more control over their health data. What's missing is an option for patients to share their data securely with researchers. Diagnosis: A number of tools analyze scans of patients' lungs to detect coronavirus infections.

Proteins are biological high-performance machines. They can be found in every cell and play an important role in human blood coagulation or as main constituents of hairs or muscles. The function of these molecular tools is obvious from their structure. Researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have now developed a new method to predict this protein structure with the help of artificial intelligence. This is very difficult to detect, the experiments needed for this purpose are expensive and complex.

Google -owned AI specialist, DeepMind, has claimed a "significant milestone" in being able to demonstrate the usefulness of artificial intelligence to help with the complex task of predicting 3D structures of proteins based solely on their genetic sequence. Understanding protein structures is important in disease diagnosis and treatment, and could improve scientists' understanding of the human body -- as well as potentially helping to support protein design and bioengineering. Writing in a blog post about the project to use AI to predict how proteins fold -- now two years in -- it writes: "The 3D models of proteins that AlphaFold [DeepMind's AI] generates are far more accurate than any that have come before -- making significant progress on one of the core challenges in biology." There are various scientific methods for predicting the native 3D state of protein molecules (i.e. But modelling the 3D structure is a highly complex task, given how many permutations there can be on account of protein folding being dependent on factors such as interactions between amino acids.