How can artificial intelligence help optimize resources within hospitals?

As many of us know with this covid-19 pandemic the hospitals of the world have collapsed due to the number of patients arriving at these care centers.

Within the hospitals not only the emergencies collapse, it is not only a critical state due to the lack of personnel to attend the cases of crown virus, it is also a critical state the optimization of resources, and when I refer to the optimization of resources I mean that it is necessary to select correctly the patients that really are going to deserve the intensive care room, now perhaps many of our friends readers are wondering:

How are we going to know which patients are candidates for the intensive care unit?

It is this question that leads us to investigate new forms of help, which is why artificial intelligence plays a leading role in this scenario. Science and technology have been working and contributing to many factors in all that concerns the health issues referred to in covid-19.

Being able to predict in advance whether a patient with Covid-19 disease will generate severe respiratory failure and require admission to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) is part of a logistical and resource aid, since by anticipating this, everything necessary can be prepared in advance, and not only in terms of logistics and resource optimization, We will also be able to save lives earlier, as the patient who does not yet have symptoms worthy of being in the intensive care unit with the help of artificial intelligence will be able to detect some elements that will make patients be taken to the intensive care unit earlier.

Bioengineers and epidemiologists specialized in respiratory diseases and pneumology have been working on this artificial intelligence technology project. These professionals are the ones who have been working to make this covid-19 disease one of the things it is characterized by is to present respiratory complications.

The bioengineers will undoubtedly work to provide what is necessary so that this model of artificial intelligence can detect early patterns that indicate the evolution of the disease in a few seconds, it is something like predicting possible future symptoms and thus take patients to the (ICU) in an early manner, thus saving all the risks involved in admitting a patient to the ICU when he has no chance of saving his life.

What artificial intelligence tools are being worked on to be applied in the early detection of symptoms that ultimately merit a patient's placement in the intensive care unit (ICU)?

To develop the model of artificial intelligence that can detect early the symptoms that make the patient enter the intensive care unit is necessary the application of certain tools such as deep learning and neural networks, along with the processing power of IBM Power systems.

All the tools mentioned above can analyze thousands of clinical data and anonymous medical images that can be provided by different major hospitals in the world to continue the research and scientific advances that help create the model of artificial intelligence in question.

Conclusion

Investigations such as these, which seek to generate a model of artificial intelligence in order to cope with this health crisis resulting from the covid-19, will help us in case of being able to estimate in advance the patients who may need to be immediately admitted to the intensive care unit.

With this early detection what is sought mainly is to organize the care of patients in hospitals to avoid collapse, the other thing as I said at the beginning of the article is that it also seeks to prioritize the resources that are necessary in the use for cases of new outbreaks of the disease.

The other thing to take into account is that it is not an easy task to predict the patients who will be candidates for admission to the intensive care unit, since the project is still in its first phase, in which the first activities carried out are training, in which artificial intelligence models are used with image data, everything seems to indicate that the implementation for the second phase of this research project is planned for the last quarter of 2020.

Let us hope that all the time invested in this project can provide an emerging aid for patients who arrive at hospitals with the hope of not dying from covid-19 disease.

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