A Systematic Review: Role of Artificial Intelligence During the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Healthcare System

Introduction

COVID-19 pandemic is a huge challenge for doctors, public health professionals, epidemiologists, and researchers to bring effective and efficient solutions worldwide. Simultaneously, it is time for digital technologists to deeply engage in bringing optimal solutions in healthcare systems for controlling this devastating pandemic. Certainly, one of the digital health tools in the form of artificial intelligence (AI) has a remarkable role in predicting, tracing, and quickly diagnosing COVID-19 patients. AI is a form of machine learning and in health care innovation AI has gained obvious visibility in different medical fields (Maddox et al., 2019).

In January 2020, the American center for disease control (CDC) reported a notification to the world health organization (WHO) about the disease flu-like outbreak in China and since then the virus appeared as a COVID-19 pandemic globally. It was observed that the Canadian health authorities AI platform (BlueDot) issued a warning four weeks before this pandemic about the pattern of spread of COVID-19. This helped the Canadian government to take precautionary measures, local isolation strategies, and prepare travel regulations/policies earlier as compared to other courtesies without such AI-assisted platforms. For epidemiologists and public health care, AI is helping to rapidly collect data all over the world and predicting the spread of disease and contact tracing (Boccaletti et al., 2020).

Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic will be a game-changer and bring major reforms in healthcare through the embracement of AI in different aspects of patient care (Coombs, 2020; Irwin, 2020). Understanding the nature of the disease and control the spread of COVID-19, we need digital technology assistants to support healthcare professionals to avoid future pandemics (Lai et al., 2020). For radiologists, (AI) is proving as a breakthrough revolution to the diagnosis of infected patients accurately and decision making for mechanical ventilation (Ai et al., 2020; Hare et al., 2020). The role of radiologists embraces not only early detection of lung abnormality but also determine the disease severity, predict the possible bacterial co-infection and potential progression to acute respiratory distress syndrome in hospitalized patients. AI models for the chest radiographs and CT scans may ease the load of radiologists and clinicians (Kim, 2020).

Additionally, AI is helping in faster genome sequencing by virologists at infectious disease control units. The advanced AI tools are assisting to find vaccines against COVID-19 and prepare a synthetic copy of the virus and build research requirements for bio technicians. Cutting-edge AI technical support is assisting fast clinical trials and suggesting suitable drugs against COVID-19 with the prediction of side effects. For instance, the AI-based tools may predict drugs/peptides straight from the sequences of infected patients and may contribute in the direction of vaccine design against COVID-19 (Chandra Kaushik & Raj, 2020).