The Search To Save Lives: How Machine Learning Is Fighting Covid-19 With Data

 |   Microsoft New Zealand News Centre

When it comes to a global pandemic, no matter where you live or how you’re affected, there’s one thing almost all of us share.

Questions.

Which information can I trust?

Where do I get that information?

And whether you’re a parent or a medical professional on the frontlines of the daily treatment battle, you also want to know:

What can I do? 

That’s the question that drove Microsoft cognitive search specialist Jennifer Marsman to look for a way to help researchers and medical workers navigate a clear path through the mountains of information making its way online daily.

“As a mother, I read headlines that suggested giving children ibuprofen could make COVID-19 symptoms worse. I tried to find out how accurate the results were, but there was a lot of conflicting information online and a lot of it was out of date. I just wanted to find a source of information I could trust,” she says.

That was her eureka moment. Like many others around the world, Jennifer and colleague Liam Cavanagh wanted to do something to support those fighting COVID-19. With the realisation that their machine learning skills could be genuinely useful to medical professionals on the frontlines, they were charged and ready to create the ultimate search tool.

As Jennifer puts it: “As a software developer, I’m not going to be making any medical innovations, but how can I help scientists and healthcare workers make their innovations faster?”

Managing the flood of COVID research

Sobering images of intensive care wards filled with struggling patients have appeared on screens around the world. For the medical teams looking after these patients, facing long shifts, isolation from families, constant trauma, it’s an ongoing battle of passion and duty vs the limits of the human body – their own just as much as their patients’.

With all this to deal with, there’s not much time left to wade through all the research. It floods from labs, hospitals, and universities around the world. Research which could contain the information to help find new techniques or medications to treat COVID-19.

“So much data is changing hour by hour. With new research papers coming out each week, it’s easy for people to get overwhelmed,” Jennifer explains.

In March 2020, she and the Cognitive Search team at Microsoft created an online search in Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. Simply called COVID-19 Search, it uses machine learning to analyse the online medical journals and research papers in Semantic Scholar’s COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD) database, create instant summaries for easy digestion, and enable them to be cross-referenced, even with handy graphs.

Because COVID-19 is such a global topic, their search contains around 340,000 articles and counting. Researchers can paste scholarly documents into Microsoft Translate and immediately have them translated into or from other languages. Articles drawn from are collated and augmented with intelligent features so people can search for things like “COVID-19’s impact on kidneys” or which medications are effective, how genes influence prognoses, and articles by specific contributors. It also lets searchers find the most recent research to filter out obsolete information and summarises each article with the most salient points for time-poor readers.

“For example, the World Health Organisation warned against giving children ibuprofen, then recanted that advice. Using the search, people can narrow the parameters so they’re only getting the most up to date information, which helps remove confusion and saves them time. And, we hope, that helps save lives,” Jennifer says.

What’s next in digital healthcare?

Hospitals are now using the COVID-19 search to help them treat patients and understand relationships between symptoms, medications and outcomes, especially for more complex cases. Jennifer hopes to add even more functionality to the search as time goes on.

And this is just one example of how technology is helping address the world’s most pressing health issues.

“In New Zealand, our partners and customers are developing the most amazing solutions with AI, augmented reality (AR) and cloud platforms that are transforming the way we deal with illness and injury forever,” says Matt Bostwick, Partner Director at Microsoft New Zealand. “Even though we’ve largely been isolated from the worst of the pandemic, we’re innovating along with the best.”

Small Kiwi business CloseAssociate developed a free AI-powered COVID-19 modelling tool (which is also hosted in Azure), that enables health policy leaders to monitor the spread of the virus and model different scenarios such as what the impact on spread would be if more people wore masks or socially distanced. This has allowed agencies and organisations from the national New Zealand COVID-19 Response team to the University of Illinois to develop rapid COVID-19 management strategies to protect whole populations. Online COVID-19 maps are available for almost every country from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.

At Southern Institute of Technology, nursing students are using Microsoft HoloLens headsets to learn how to treat COVID-19 patients in the absence of actual subjects. Using AR, they can interact in the virtual world with patients presenting a range of different symptoms, to simulate a real hospital setting.

And beyond COVID, local innovators are also using technology to improve breast screening practices and pick up cancer earlier, enable better collaboration and data-sharing both within and between hospitals, and create digital twins of sprawling hospitals to provide better visibility of resources and pave the way for robots to automate time-consuming tasks. Aceso and Whanau Tahi are two Microsoft partners helping join up health services across New Zealand at the highest levels down to the grassroots.

With all that in mind, the future of healthcare and the future of technology are two sides of the same coin. Jennifer has no plans to stop innovating around machine learning and healthcare.

“Microsoft very much recognises that we have the tools, intelligence, and the resources to make a difference. When we get the chance, why wouldn’t we?” she asks simply.

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