ABSTRACT
Healthcare delivery worldwide has become a matter of urgency due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. As a result of this situation, scientists, clinicians, and medical experts are looking for the latest technologies, techniques, and methods to detect and track the novel COVID-19 progression at various stages. The COVID-19 pandemic has posed such a challenge for humanity, infecting 57.8 million individuals and causing 1.3 million deaths as of November 22, 2020. The spread is continuing with its second wave, which is assumed to be more lethal than the experts have disclosed. Its mutated variants have been identified in a few countries and are proposed to have a 60% high spread capability. Artificial intelligence (AI) techniques and machine learning (ML) applications, meant for previous epidemics, support an innovative dimension to overcome the new pandemic. AI and ML have proved to be potential techniques that aid in the rapid evaluation of findings at numerous stages to handle COVID-19 for supporting clinical entities. This chapter aims to discuss the recent developments in detection, prediction, forecasting, contact tracing, and drug development and delivery through AI and ML methods. This chapter comprises a selective assessment of the latest research articles relevant to the applications of AI and ML techniques from the databases of the Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar, using keywords of coronavirus, AI, and ML. Critical parameters such as computed tomography (CT) imaging, X-ray, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and their applications were analyzed and assessed. It has been identified that numerous applications of AI and ML algorithms have already been adopted during the pandemic and implemented to manage and contain the deadly virus. These techniques help healthcare professionals to track COVID-19 hotspots and predict its possible targets and lethal infectious spread. This chapter also identified the candidate vaccines developed so far and their stages to be approved for dispersal to people at large. It has been concluded that there is a significant requirement for decision-making technologies to handle and confine the deadly virus and get appropriate intimations to avoid its further spread. AI and ML mimic human intelligence and understand and suggest the effective development of vaccines and their possible delivery to infected communities. AI and ML-based algorithms readily identify, distinguish, and present a clear picture of the pandemic-associated parameters that allow decision making with advanced precision and specificity. The result-oriented techniques are feasibly deployed to allow proper screening, detecting, analyzing, and predicting of COVID-19 cases and their future dispersal.
