The Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru and the Oslo University Hospital and University of Adger, Norway have developed a software tool that can scan the severity of lung infections in Covid-19 patients. The software tool, AnamNet, is embedded with artificial intelligence and can look for abnormalities and classify areas of the lung scan as either infected or not and by comparing the extent of infected area with healthy area.

This work in part was supported by the WIPRO GE-CDS Collaborative Laboratory on Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Medical Imaging as well as Indo-Norwegian Collaboration in Autonomous Cyber-Physical Systems (INCAPS), INTPART Programme, Research Council of Norway.

“Now this is the first-of-its-kind software tool that can natively run on mobile phone in a standalone mode without utilising any cloud computing. Oslo University Hospital team provided the annotation data required for AI algorithm.  Those from University Agder enabled the implementation on other embedded systems like Raspberry Pi and NVIDIA Jetson,” Phaneendra Yalavarthy, Associate Professor, Department of Computational and Data Sciences, IISc said.

It is developed with clinicians from Oslo University Hospital radiologists. It is not for diagnostic purpose as of now as it has to get regulatory approvals. We started working on it in March 2020 and the full development took about 6 months, he added. The findings have also been published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems.

“AnamNet employs deep learning and other image processing techniques, which have now become integral to biomedical research and applications. The software can identify infected areas in a chest CT scan with a high degree of accuracy referred to as anamorphic image processing,” said Naveen Paluru, first author and PhD student in the lab of Phaneendra Yalavarthy, CDS.               

The researchers noted that AnamNet holds promise beyond merely identifying lung infections in Covid-19 patients. Efforts are on to look at other common lung diseases like pneumonia, fibrosis, lung cancer and with certain changes to the present design, it could be also used to read brain scans.