Powerful AI Tools Being Developed for the COVID-19 Fight
Curator: Stephen J. Williams, Ph.D.
Source: https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2020/04/ai-powered-technologies-accelerate-discovery-covid-19/
IBM Releases Novel AI-Powered Technologies to Help Health and Research Community Accelerate the Discovery of Medical Insights and Treatments for COVID-19
April 3, 2020 | Written by: Dario Gil
IBM Research has been actively developing new cloud and AI-powered technologies that can help researchers across a variety of scientific disciplines accelerate the process of discovery. As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds, we continue to ask how these technologies and our scientific knowledge can help in the global battle against coronavirus.
Today, we are making available multiple novel, free resources from across IBM to help healthcare researchers, doctors and scientists around the world accelerate COVID-19 drug discovery: from gathering insights, to applying the latest virus genomic information and identifying potential targets for treatments, to creating new drug molecule candidates.
Though some of the resources are still in exploratory stages, IBM is making them available to qualifying researchers at no charge to aid the international scientific investigation of COVID-19.
Today’s announcement follows our recent leadership in launching the U.S. COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, which is harnessing massive computing power in the effort to help confront the coronavirus.
Streamlining the Search for Information
Healthcare agencies and governments around the world have quickly amassed medical and other relevant data about the pandemic. And, there are already vast troves of medical research that could prove relevant to COVID-19. Yet, as with any large volume of disparate data sources, it is difficult to efficiently aggregate and analyze that data in ways that can yield scientific insights.
To help researchers access structured and unstructured data quickly, we are offering a cloud-based AI research resource that has been trained on a corpus of thousands of scientific papers contained in the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19), prepared by the White House and a coalition of research groups, and licensed databases from the DrugBank, Clinicaltrials.gov and GenBank. This tool uses our advanced AI and allows researchers to pose specific queries to the collections of papers and to extract critical COVID-19 knowledge quickly. Please note, access to this resource will be granted only to qualified researchers. To learn more and request access, please click here.
Aiding the Hunt for Treatments
The traditional drug discovery pipeline relies on a library of compounds that are screened, improved, and tested to determine safety and efficacy. In dealing with new pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2, there is the potential to enhance the compound libraries with additional novel compounds. To help address this need, IBM Research has recently created a new, AI-generative framework which can rapidly identify novel peptides, proteins, drug candidates and materials.
We have applied this AI technology against three COVID-19 targets to identify 3,000 new small molecules as potential COVID-19 therapeutic candidates. IBM is releasing these molecules under an open license, and researchers can study them via a new interactive molecular explorer tool to understand their characteristics and relationship to COVID-19 and identify candidates that might have desirable properties to be further pursued in drug development.
To streamline efforts to identify new treatments for COVID-19, we are also making the IBM Functional Genomics Platform available for free for the duration of the pandemic. Built to discover the molecular features in viral and bacterial genomes, this cloud-based repository and research tool includes genes, proteins and other molecular targets from sequenced viral and bacterial organisms in one place with connections pre-computed to help accelerate discovery of molecular targets required for drug design, test development and treatment.
Select IBM collaborators from government agencies, academic institutions and other organizations already use this platform for bacterial genomic study. And now, those working on COVID-19 can request the IBM Functional Genomics Platform interface to explore the genomic features of the virus. Access to the IBM Functional Genomics Platform will be prioritized for those conducting COVID-19 research. To learn more and request access, please click here.
Drug and Disease Information
Clinicians and healthcare professionals on the frontlines of care will also have free access to hundreds of pieces of evidence-based, curated COVID-19 and infectious disease content from IBM Micromedex and EBSCO DynaMed. Using these two rich decision support solutions, users will have access to drug and disease information in a single and comprehensive search. Clinicians can also provide patients with consumer-friendly patient education handouts with relevant, actionable medical information. IBM Micromedex is one of the largest online reference databases for medication information and is used by more than 4,500 hospitals and health systems worldwide. EBSCO DynaMed provides peer-reviewed clinical content, including systematic literature reviews in 28 specialties for comprehensive disease topics, health conditions and abnormal findings, to highly focused topics on evaluation, differential diagnosis and management.
The scientific community is working hard to make important new discoveries relevant to the treatment of COVID-19, and we’re hopeful that releasing these novel tools will help accelerate this global effort. This work also outlines our long-term vision for the future of accelerated discovery, where multi-disciplinary scientists and clinicians work together to rapidly and effectively create next generation therapeutics, aided by novel AI-powered technologies.
Learn more about IBM’s response to COVID-19: IBM.com/COVID19.
Source: https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2020/04/ai-powered-technologies-accelerate-discovery-covid-19/
DiA Imaging Analysis Receives Grant to Accelerate Global Access to its AI Ultrasound Solutions in the Fight Against COVID-19
Source: https://www.grantnews.com/news-articles/?rkey=20200512UN05506&filter=12337
Grant will allow company to accelerate access to its AI solutions and use of ultrasound in COVID-19 emergency settings
TEL AVIV, Israel, May 12, 2020 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ — DiA Imaging Analysis, a leading provider of AI based ultrasound analysis solutions, today announced that it has received a government grant from the Israel Innovation Authority (IIA) to develop solutions for ultrasound imaging analysis of COVID-19 patients using Artificial Intelligence (AI).Using ultrasound in point of care emergency settings has gained momentum since the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic. In these settings, which include makeshift hospital COVID-19 departments and triage “tents,” portable ultrasound offers clinicians diagnostic decision support, with the added advantage of being easier to disinfect and eliminating the need to transport patients from one room to another.However, analyzing ultrasound images is a process that it is still mostly done visually, leading to a growing market need for automated solutions and decision support.As the leading provider of AI solutions for ultrasound analysis and backed by Connecticut Innovations, DiA makes ultrasound analysis smarter and accessible to both new and expert ultrasound users with various levels of experience. The company’s flagship LVivo Cardio Toolbox for AI-based cardiac ultrasound analysis enables clinicians to automatically generate objective clinical analysis, with increased accuracy and efficiency to support decisions about patient treatment and care.
The IIA grant provides a budget of millions NIS to increase access to DiA’s solutions for users in Israel and globally, and accelerate R&D with a focus on new AI solutions for COVID-19 patient management. DiA solutions are vendor-neutral and platform agnostic, as well as powered to run in low processing, mobile environments like handheld ultrasound.Recent data highlights the importance of looking at the heart during the progression of COVID-19, with one study citing 20% of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 showing signs of heart damage and increased mortality rates in those patients. DiA’s LVivo cardiac analysis solutions automatically generate objective, quantified cardiac ultrasound results to enable point-of-care clinicians to assess cardiac function on the spot, near patients’ bedside.
According to Dr. Ami Applebaum, the Chairman of the Board of the IIA, “The purpose of IIA’s call was to bring solutions to global markets for fighting COVID-19, with an emphasis on relevancy, fast time to market and collaborations promising continuity of the Israeli economy. DiA meets these requirements with AI innovation for ultrasound.”DiA has received several FDA/CE clearances and established distribution partnerships with industry leading companies including GE Healthcare, IBM Watson and Konica Minolta, currently serving thousands of end users worldwide.”We see growing use of ultrasound in point of care settings, and an urgent need for automated, objective solutions that provide decision support in real time,” said Hila Goldman-Aslan, CEO and Co-founder of DiA Imaging Analysis, “Our AI solutions meet this need by immediately helping clinicians on the frontlines to quickly and easily assess COVID-19 patients’ hearts to help guide care delivery.”
About DiA Imaging Analysis:
DiA Imaging Analysis provides advanced AI-based ultrasound analysis technology that makes ultrasound accessible to all. DiA’s automated tools deliver fast and accurate clinical indications to support the decision-making process and offer better patient care. DiA’s AI-based technology uses advanced pattern recognition and machine-learning algorithms to automatically imitate the way the human eye detects image borders and identifies motion. Using DiA’s tools provides automated and objective AI tools, helps reduce variability among users, and increases efficiency. It allows clinicians with various levels of experience to quickly and easily analyze ultrasound images.
For additional information, please visit http://www.dia-analysis.com.
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