Researchers in the United Kingdom have developed a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool that can detect Covid-19.
To accurately diagnose the disease, the software analyses chest CT scans and employs deep learning algorithms. According to the University of Leicester team, it is currently the most successful Covid-19 diagnostic tool in the world, with an accuracy rate of 97.86%.
Covid is currently diagnosed using nucleic acid testing, or PCR tests as they are more commonly known. These tests can produce false negatives, and the results can be influenced by hysteresis, which occurs when the physical manifestations of an illness lag behind their cause.
As a result, AI allows for the rapid screening and effective monitoring of Covid cases on a large scale, reducing the burden on doctors.
“Research focuses on the automatic diagnosis of Covid-19 based on random graph neural networks. The results showed that our method can find the suspicious regions in the chest images automatically and make accurate predictions based on the representations,” said Yudong Zhang, Professor of Knowledge Discovery and Machine Learning at the varsity.
“The accuracy of the system means that it can be used in the clinical diagnosis of Covid-19, which may help to control the spread of the virus. We hope that, in the future, this type of technology will allow for automated computer diagnosis without the need for manual intervention, in order to create a smarter, efficient healthcare service,” Zhang said.
The study appears in the International Journal of Intelligent Systems.
Researchers will now work to improve this technology in the hope that it will eventually replace the need for radiologists to diagnose Covid in clinics.
The software, which can be used in portable devices such as smartphones, will also be adapted and expanded to detect and diagnose other diseases (including breast cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and cardiovascular disease).
