Showing papers by "Mohamed L. Seghier published in 2020"

The COVID-19 pandemic: What can bioengineers, computer scientists and big data specialists bring to the table.

Abstract: COVID-19, the infectious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has put to the test many sectors such as health, education, socioeconomic development, transport, trade and finance. Millions of people have been infected, hundreds of thousands have died, and the toll continues to soar. The international scientific community has found itself in a race against time to contain the spread of the disease, with an urgent need to devise fast screening and triage systems for early detection and isolation of affected patients. With advanced health-care technologies and prior experiences with many epidemics in the past, people were confident that the scientific community will lead them out of this crisis. However, what has become apparent is a sense of panic and amateurism of some healthcare authorities, and a lack of agreement among scientists and experts with sometimes conflicting recommendations from trusted research institutions. This will not be the last pandemic; the international scientific community must learn valuable lessons from it to be able to combat future disease outbreaks that could be more infectious and lethal than COVID-19. Over the past few months, we heard the voice of many key players in the global fight against this pandemic, including health professionals, crisis counselors, epidemiologists, medical scientists and immunologists. In this editorial, we aim to cast light on the crucial contribution of other players, working behind the scenes, including bioengineers, computer scientists and big data specialists. Their contribution is shaping the way the international community is going to stop this outbreak. This concerns promoting innovative solutions to the following four areas that are of paramount importance to current global interventions: (a) develop portable imaging systems that are fast and accurate for diagnostic and prognostic purposes, (b) create bespoke databases with robust and secure data-sharing protocols of patient-level COVID-19 metadata, (c) devise AI-powered tools that can process complex data and can make accurate and useful individualized data-driven predictions and (d) derive accurate models about the spread of pandemics, with the ultimate aim to generate useful forecasts about the effects of interventions. 1 | DEVELOP PORTABLE IMAGING SYSTEMS