Technology companies around the world are committed to fighting the coronavirus pandemic. Research has shown that 6.5% of COVID-19 patients can suddenly progress to serious illness and, among them, the mortality rate can reach 49%. Therefore, one of the key tasks for health authorities is to identify and treat patients who may develop severe or fatal syndromes early.
This is what has been initiated in a research team jointly set up by Tencent AI Lab and a group of Chinese public health scientists led by Zhong Nanshan, the country's senior medical advisor on COVID-19, since its inception in February.
This week, the team presented a model based on deep learning that could predict the risk of coronavirus patients developing critical diseases. The details were published in Nature Communications, telling how the laboratory devised the model based on a cohort of 1590 patients from 575 medical centers in China, with further validation from 1393 patients.
The joint laboratory made the predictor available online, allowing clinical staff around the world to calculate patients' likelihood of developing critical illness within 5, 10 and 30 days using ten clinical variables. While its immediate focus is on COVID-19, the lab's long-term mission, in its own words, is to "use big data and AI for the screening, prevention and control and warning of outbreaks, respiratory and thoracic diseases ".
Other Chinese tech giants have undertaken similar projects to contain the deadly virus. Using machine and deep learning, Alibaba has created a tool for institutions to predict the spread of COVID-19 with an alleged 90% accuracy rate. Baidu has opened an algorithm for viral structural analysis, claiming that the process is 120 times faster than the traditional method.
Tencent AI Lab is the effort of the technological giant to remain afloat in a race to develop cutting-edge technologies alongside profitable companies such as video games and social networks. Launched in 2016, the research arm deals with artificial vision, voice recognition, natural language processing and machine learning through a team of 70 researchers and 300 engineers.
The lab competes with its local counterparts such as Alibaba's Damo Academy and Baidu Research to hunt down the world's best AI minds. Often this means hiring an established scientist to attract young talent. In recent years, Baidu has suffered from the departure of Andrew Ng and Lu Qi, and Tencent AI Lab has also lost its leading figure Zhang Tong last year.