Pakistani students develop AI tool for faster coronavirus diagnosis

Developers Mohammad Aleem, Rahul Raj hope to expand their COVID-19 research with govt help

As coronavirus death tolls and new cases continue to rise across the world, medical researchers and engineers are working diligently to create diagnosis kits and vaccines to control the pandemic.

Two Pakistani students have joined the effort and developed an artificial intelligence (AI) tool to help diagnose coronavirus to counter the shortage of test kits as the government tries to control the virus.

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Mohammad Aleem and his colleague, Rahul Raj, both final year students at Gulam Ishaq Khan Institute (GIKI), turned to technology to help Pakistan battle the virus.

“As the virus is still growing exponentially and our hospitals are already overwhelmed, we decided to turn to artificial intelligence to help promptly identify cases in the absence of testing kits”, Aleem told Gulf News.

“The AI-powered deep learning model that we have developed from scratch can help detect COVID-19 with 92% confidence using computed tomography (CT) scan of lungs,” he said.

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“The detector relies on the chest CT imaging. If the CT scans are available then it would hardly take 10-20 seconds to perform the analysis and find out if the patient is COVID-19 positive,” explains Raj.

This makes the process of detection less time consuming and requires little human interaction.

“We immediately need more CT scans of coronavirus patients to improve the detector’s accuracy and begin testing.”

Both developers are hoping that with government assistance they will be able to expand their research and help save Pakistan from this crisis.

This article was originally published on Gulf News.