SARS-COV-2, also known as coronavirus has shocked  the world with an outbreak that is at least 10 times more lethal than influenza, and much more communicable. Our knowledge of the virus and its potential risk factors is still limited, even if growing day by day. Some states are struggling to facilitate the population’s health needs forcing health providers to prioritize patients most urgently need in care, also called triage. On the other hand nations such as Taiwan, managed to avoid mass casualty scenarios by detecting infected individuals early through deployment of automatic, digital diagnostics and tracking through mobile devices of infected individuals. Many countries went on to develop such triage systems, however, limited SARS-COV-2 clinical data restricts the systems to rule based solutions mostly derived from information of the general SARS-COV family.

A team of scientists at IBM is set to address this limitation by developing a solution informed by our experience in building leading medical triage systems with Medgate https://www.cnnmoney.ch/shows/big-picture/videos/ibm-and-medgate-andy-fischer-creating-chatbot-diagnose-your-aches-and and real-world medical data from IBM’s explorys database https://www.ibm.com/watson-health/about/explorys, currently counting around 18’000 SARS-COV-2 infected individuals.

Accurate risk assesments are crucial for resource priorization. We hope to help government entities better predict the capacity of ICUs, number of beds or critical instruments such as ventilators by using machine learning models and real-wold-clinical data.

Beyond medical triage IBM is accelerating drug discovery by providing AI tools and computing resources in the hope of finding a vaccine to end this pandemic. https://venturebeat.com/2020/04/13/what-privacy-preserving-coronavirus-tracing-apps-need-to-succeed/  

Copyright by Alexander Büsser, IBM

Alexander Büsser

Manging Data Science Consultant | Data Science Lead
IBM

Virtual Global AI Conference
Co-Hosted by AI Capital & SwissCognitive

“We hope to help government entities better predict the capacity of ICUs, number of beds or critical instruments such as ventilators by using machine learning models and real-wold-clinical data. Beyond medical triage IBM is accelerating drug discovery by providing AI tools and computing resources in the hope of finding a vaccine to end this pandemic.”

Alexander Büsser, IBM

Remarks from SwissCognitive: Alexander Büsser was one of the global speakers at SwissCognitive’s first Virtual AI Conference, co-organised with AI Capital on 31st March and 1st April. The conference gave an intensive overview from various industry-perspectives on how AI helps us to overcome challenges caused by the Coronavirus, and how this technology is going to provide us with new ways of processes and functioning after the crisis. The Virtual AI Conference was attended by 500 attendees, calling-in from 20 countries, and its content was spread through SwissCognitive’s social media channels, reaching 400k followers in the AI eco-system.