Healthcare AI a ‘potent tool’ in the global pandemic project
For champions of AI in healthcare, the COVID-19 crisis affords an unignorable opportunity to trumpet the technology’s current contributions while directing attention to its potential for helping fight public-health crises to come.
As vice chair of the Alliance for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare, Brandon Allgood, PhD, is up for the assignment.
In a contributed piece published by The Hill, Allgood recaps some themes that emerged as AI entered the healthcare ecosystem—streamlining clinical workflows, speeding clinical diagnostics, enabling drug discovery—before taking a look at what some specific AI companies are doing to help battle COVID.
Among the businesses he introduces is New York-based Envisagenics, which has developed an AI platform that analyzes 1,000 polymerise chain reaction (PCR) testing samples in two hours. The current analysis takes up to two days.
“Time saves lives,” Allgood writes, “and the company hopes to release the platform for commercial use in the coming weeks.”
Allgood also summarizes the AI-incorporating products and services of Montreal-based Hexoskin (remote monitoring of biometrics data), San Francisco-based Auransa (personalized drug recommendations), UK-based Medopad (biomarker-associated risk factor identification) and others.
“Leveraging the potential of AI and machine learning capabilities provides a potent tool to the global community in tackling the pandemic,” he writes. “AI presents novel ways to address old problems and opens doors to solving newly developing population health concerns.”
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