The COVID-19 pandemic has forced nearly every industry today to rethink their standard approaches to effectively deal with this massive obstacle. The healthcare and government sectors specifically have had to adapt more quickly, which has led to an acceleration in the development of artificial intelligence, or “AI.”
Given the impact AI can have in the medical world, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved an emergency authorization of a somewhat untested algorithm to try and help speed up the fight against COVID. From this, however, several working vaccines have been developed, in addition to improved patient treatment and an increase in testing.
The discussion of robotics’ role in ending this pandemic began last summer, when professionals of several fields met virtually to analyze the current state of this technology, concluding that advances are important and necessary. One of the challenges, however, was that frontline healthcare workers needed a more localized adaptation of these advanced technologies. The studies conducted were unclear of bias in the data that had so far been collected.
Drug development and testing is one area that has seemed to benefit greatly from machine learning, given that standard methods can be costly and time consuming. Already existing drugs and those that have been FDA approved have been studied to treat COVID-19. This is where artificial intelligence comes into play. AI is ideal for combing through enormous collections of data and gathering information from various sources.
Of course, which drugs will be approved for patient treatment will be decided by physicians. But, AI can better regulate clinical trials and cut down time spent on testing. For example, this technology can create simulations as to how some of these drugs will work when paired with certain data like health records and insurance claims.
With all of this said, while the COVID-19 pandemic is still present in our world today, there is much to be optimistic about. Artificial intelligence has proven to be a helpful tool in the fight against this disease, much like its role in fighting other existing diseases. The key is continuous testing to determine the metaphorical ‘nail in the coffin’ for COVID.