IIT team develops method to detect Covid-19 from x-rays

Researchers at IIT Jodhpur have developed an explainable Artificial Intelligence solution to predict Covid-19 from chest x-rays, a move that may help countries struggling with a dearth of testing kits and processing centres in remote areas.

Since the symptoms of Covid-19 are visible on a chest x-ray, it has become one of the modalities that have gained acceptance as a screening technique.

A research paper on this project has been published in the journal “Pattern Recognition (Volume 122)”.

The research is part of the RAKSHAK project under NM-CPS DST and iHuB Drishti at IIT Jodhpur. Researchers aim at developing a full-scale prototype through the knowledge learnt in this project.

The team has proposed a deep learning-based algorithm called COMiT-Net, which learns the abnormalities present in the chest x-ray images to differentiate between a Covid-affected lung and a non-affected lung.

The developed AI algorithm not only predicts whether the CXR has Covid-19 pneumonia or not, but it is also capable of identifying the infected regions in the lungs, thus making them explainable.

The uniqueness of this research is that the proposed study can visually showcase the region which is infected, the technique interprets only from the lung region, the Artificial Intelligence solution used in this research is explainable from both algorithmic and medical points of view.

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