Alibaba Cloud is now offering its AI-powered technologies to medical professionals in an effort to help provide data insights on the coronavirus while also speeding up diagnosis.The cloud computing arm of the Chinese tech giant hopes that it can support medical professionals worldwide in fighting the virus by providing them with a suite of applications developed by its cloud experts, researchers from its subsidiary DAMO Academy and engineers from its communications platform DingTalk.

According to Alibaba, the AI-powered applications were developed using insights and lessons learned during the initial outbreak of the coronavirus.While DingTalk was used by over 120m Chinese students to attend live-streamed online classes, its team also launched DingTalk's International Medical Expert Communication Platform on Alibaba Cloud which provides free communication for medical workers all over the world.Through video conferencing and real-time AI translation into 11 languages, Alibaba Cloud is also trying to build a virtual community where doctors from China can share their experiences and answer questions from their peers around the world.Alibaba's research arm DAMO Academy also revealed that it would make three applications available as a free trial to medical professionals and researchers.The firm's CT Image Analytics Solution can help improve testing accuracy as well as detection speed when diagnosing Covid-19.

By running deep-learning algorithms trained on data from China, the AI model has the ability to predict the probability of different pneumonia types.

The system is also able to compute the proportion of lesions and affected volume ratio to the entire lungs by using lung segmentation methods.DAMO Academy's Epidemic Prediction Solution is able to map epidemic characteristics of the coronavirus in a particular region by generating estimates of size, peak time and duration of the epidemic.

It can also estimate how quickly the coronavirus will spread under three conditions: optimistic, neutral and pessimistic.The firm's Genome Sequencing for Coronavirus Diagnostic Solution provides further analytics on the coronavirus including viral genetic data screening, protein structure analysis and diagnostic reporting.

The AI-powered platform is said to be able to diagnose new coronavirus cases within 14 hours.Having dealt with the cornavirus at the beginning of the outbreak, it's great to see that Alibaba is doing its part to share its experience and knowledge with medical professionals around the world.Via ZDNet