Machine learning research towards combating COVID-19: Virus detection, spread prevention, and medical assistance.

Journal: Journal of biomedical informatics
Published Date:

Abstract

COVID-19 was first discovered in December 2019 and has continued to rapidly spread across countries worldwide infecting thousands and millions of people. The virus is deadly, and people who are suffering from prior illnesses or are older than the age of 60 are at a higher risk of mortality. Medicine and Healthcare industries have surged towards finding a cure, and different policies have been amended to mitigate the spread of the virus. While Machine Learning (ML) methods have been widely used in other domains, there is now a high demand for ML-aided diagnosis systems for screening, tracking, predicting the spread of COVID-19 and finding a cure against it. In this paper, we present a journey of what role ML has played so far in combating the virus, mainly looking at it from a screening, forecasting, and vaccine perspective. We present a comprehensive survey of the ML algorithms and models that can be used on this expedition and aid with battling the virus.

Authors

  • Osama Shahid
    Department of Information Technology, Kennesaw State University, Marietta, GA, USA. Electronic address: oshahid1@students.kennesaw.edu.
  • Mohammad Nasajpour
    Department of Information Technology, Kennesaw State University, Marietta, GA, USA. Electronic address: mnasajp1@students.kennesaw.edu.
  • Seyedamin Pouriyeh
    Department of Information Technology, Kennesaw State University, Marietta, GA, USA. Electronic address: spouriye@kennesaw.edu.
  • Reza M Parizi
    Department of Software Engineering and Game Development, Kennesaw State University, Marietta, GA, USA. Electronic address: rparizi1@kennesaw.edu.
  • Meng Han
    School of Economics, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, China.
  • Maria Valero
    Department of Information Technology, Kennesaw State University, Marietta, GA, USA. Electronic address: mvalero2@kennesaw.edu.
  • Fangyu Li
    Song are with Center for Cyber-Physical Systems, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA.
  • Mohammed Aledhari
    Department of Computer Science, Kennesaw State University, Marietta, GA, USA. Electronic address: maledhar@kennesaw.edu.
  • Quan Z Sheng
    Department of Computing, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Electronic address: michael.sheng@mq.edu.au.