A wing of Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and Norway-India Partnership Initiative have jointly launched a study to detect coronavirus infection from cough sounds of people using artificial intelligence (AI).
A mobile App has been developed the partnership, in which people who are not infected by the virus are recording their cough sound, while researchers have collected such sounds from COVID-19 patients.
An analysis using AI will be conducted on the mixed database of cough sound samples to find out a coronavirus infected person, Director of Regional Medical Research Centre (RMRC), Dr Sanghamitra Pati, said.
The RMRC of Bhubaneswar is a permanent research centre of ICMR.
“A similar study was conducted in case of x-ray analysis of pneumonia patients in the past. The goal was to identify which is the x-ray of a pneumonia case and which is not,” Pati said.
Similar initiative was also launched by UK researchers at the University of Cambridge. Anyone can go to the University of Cambridge’s ‘COVID-19 Sounds’ webpage to submit recordings of them breathing in and out, coughing, and speaking.
The audio data, to be stored on university servers, will help develop machine-learning algorithms that could be used for automatic detection of the illness.
The developers of the application, who hope to collect recordings from as many people as possible, think it can help them detect coronavirus from a person’s cough or even their voice.
The work is about diagnostics and in time, with enough data, we hope that cough or even voice could be used for early diagnosis,’ said Professor Cecilia Mascolo from Cambridge’s Department of Computer Science and Technology, who led the development of the app.
‘Apparently both can have quite specific changes in this disease.
‘There’s still so much we don’t know about this virus and the illness it causes, and in a pandemic situation like the one we’re currently in, the more reliable information you can get, the better.’
Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications for COVID-19 pandemic
Healthcare organizations are in an urgent need for decision-making technologies to handle this virus and help them in getting proper suggestions in real-time to avoid its spread. AI works in a proficient way to mimic like human intelligence. It may also play a vital role in understanding and suggesting the development of a vaccine for COVID-19. This result-driven technology is used for proper screening, analyzing, prediction and tracking of current patients and likely future patients. The significant applications are applied to tracks data of confirmed, recovered and death cases.
