MURAJ: In Focus - Application of Artificial Intelligence to Help Fight COVID-19

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is gradually changing modern medical practice. With recent progress of deep learning, which is a broader family of machine learning, AI applications are expanding into medical areas that were previously thought to be only the province of human experts. In February of 2020, radiologists found that patients’ chest xrays had a high predictive power to diagnose coronavirus (COVID-19) and a group of researchers led by Professor Ju Sun at the University of Minnesota started to work on an AI algorithm to improve diagnosis of COVID. Le Peng, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, met with Minnesota Undergraduate Research and Academic Journal (MURAJ) to discuss the technical details of this AI algorithm that may intrigue undergraduate students who are interested in deep learning, as well as elaborated on his experience of doing research under the unprecedented global pandemic.