Initiative Seeks to Leverage Artificial Intelligence to Defeat COVID-19

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning can offer real help against COVID-19. Neosperience created a team of experts working with our technologies to develop screening algorithms that support the health system.

With the hashtag #defeatcovid19, Neosperience launched the initiative and community defeatcovid19.org to onboard all organizations and experts in Artificial Intelligence. The goal is to identify technological answers that support healthcare departments and doctors in such a difficult time.

To this purpose, the company has already made available its platform and its team of data scientists to organizations and bodies that fight against Coronavirus, joined by the Milan Polytechnic, the first partner of the initiative.

The technologies available include neural networks specialized in identifying specific patterns within images and data correlation models. Patterns can be used to support screening and, subsequently, to make the evaluation of therapies more robust concerning the data collected, thus improving the estimation of the prognosis.

“We are gathering a team of artificial intelligence experts from all over the world - explained Dario Melpignano, President of Neosperience. The company made available its Neosperience Cloud platform, Core Edition, offered for free to all public and private and non-profit research institutions, active in the health ecosystem, who will request it for developing novel COVID-19 screening methods.

Giuseppe Andreoni, coordinator of the TeDH laboratory (Technology and Design for Health) of the Milan Polytechnic and scientific coordinator of the Nestore project, funded by the European research program Horizon 2020, which already sees Neosperience engaged together with 14 European public and private research organizations, is confident of the value of the initiative. “Together with Neosperience, we have created a working group that can develop screening algorithms with which to assist healthcare personnel. The team’s goal is to immediately welcome the contributions of the most expert organizations and data scientists broadly and inclusively, enhancing the efforts of each towards the common good.”

A challenge that brings together technical skills and ideal motivations, as the President of Neosperience reemphasizes. “In recent weeks, we have dedicated ourselves to understanding how to be more useful to our community in the difficult situation we are experiencing. One of the primary needs is to have diagnostic tools available that are quick and easy to integrate into the screening processes. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning can provide a contribution in early diagnosis to health systems around the world: to organize operations, plan therapies, and improve efficiency in such a critical moment.”

Dott. Alberto Barosi, Head of Non-Invasive Cardiovascular Diagnostics at Luigi Sacco Hospital of Milan, an expert in the field of diagnostic ultrasound, contributed to the realization of the project. The initiative involves a pool of COVID Hospitals in the provinces of Milan, Bergamo, and Brescia.

Neosperience will promote sharing, together with the Polytechnic of Milan and the other partners who are joining (at the moment, the 14 partners of Nestore European Consortium and Value China). The results achieved will remain as shared property of the scientific world.

The data and models, together with the developed methodologies, will both be made public on open-source tools such as Github and made available to Italian and foreign research groups that request them, thus enhancing the tools to support diagnosis and treatment. Data collected anonymously in compliance with privacy legislation.