It has been 9 months for the reason that World Well being Group declared COVID-19 a pandemic, and the coronavirus continues to devastate communities. In early December, the U.S. hit an all-time excessive in each day hospitalizations, topping 100,000 — greater than double the variety of hospitalizations originally of November.

Whereas two vaccines have been accredited by the U.S. Meals and Drug Administration and are starting to be administered outdoors of scientific trials, hospitals will proceed to deal with COVID-positive sufferers by way of 2021. Consequently, there will likely be continued strains on medical sources.

Because the world continues to battle the coronavirus, there’s been a lot dialogue on using artificial intelligence (AI) as a diagnostic instrument. An equally essential dialog is the position of AI in medical useful resource administration.

Through the first wave of COVID-19 within the U.S., well being care techniques scrambled to acquire sufficient ventilators and create makeshift ICU beds to deal with sufferers. With restricted sources, physicians made troublesome selections about who can be positioned on ventilators. The gut-wrenching job may very well be made simpler with the help of AI.

Making use of laptop imaginative and prescient and machine studying algorithms to medical photos of chest scans will help physicians verify which sufferers will want an ICU mattress. Computational instruments being developed to foretell response to therapy for lung most cancers may be repurposed to assist well being care professionals decide which COVID-19 sufferers are going to develop into sick sufficient to require a ventilator.

Making knowledgeable selections concerning the allocation of invaluable sources is important within the struggle to curb COVID-19 as circumstances surge within the winter, when hospitals will concurrently see a spike in sufferers with seasonal flu and community-acquired pneumonia. AI may play a significant position in danger stratification of sufferers, providing a scientific strategy to triaging sufferers and appropriately earmarking medical sources when well being care techniques want them most.

Madabhushi is a professor of biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve College in Cleveland and director of the Middle for Computational Imaging and Customized Diagnostics.