Austrian scientists have created a computer program that is able to diagnose COVID-19 and other diseases based on the symptoms described by the user. Izvestia writes about this.
The authors of the development in their article in the journal Nature explained that telephone hotlines amid the coronavirus pandemic were severely overloaded. A voice assistant they created called Symptom can solve this problem. It is able to recognize the patient’s voice in 36 languages and diagnose more than 20 thousand diseases.
The developers claim that the chatbot has shown an accuracy of detecting coronavirus infection above 96 percent. Artificial intelligence evaluates signs of coronavirus infection for complaints of dry cough, fever, or contact with a carrier of COVID-19.
According to Dmitry Kaplun, Associate Professor of the Department of Automation and Control Processes at ETU LETI, such systems have a right to exist, since enough data has accumulated during the pandemic to train artificial intelligence, so the diagnostic accuracy will be at least no worse than the operator could have done.
At the same time, Alexander Fadeev, vice-rector of the Tomsk Polytechnic University for digitalization, warned that such systems do not diagnose, but only find the most suitable disease for a set of symptoms. Therefore, it is too early to trust the results they get without the participation of a doctor, he said.
Earlier, as a result of research, it became known that in people who have had coronavirus, a sufficient amount of antibodies is released after the first dose of the vaccine. This fact made scientists think about the uselessness of a second COVID-19 vaccination for those who have survived the infection.