Tunisia is stepping up in the worldwide fight against the coronavirus.
Engineers in the North African nation have unveiled COVID-19 Exam Ct/XR images by AI, a web-based platform that can scan lung X-rays and determine whether a patient has the deadly infection.
Teachers and students at the Tunisian engineering and technology institute INSAT have been developing the platform since mid-March with support from German development agency GIZ, the Italian Society of Medical Radiology and US tech giant IBM, according to the AFP.
The platform is still in the testing phase, according to the AFP, but would be particularly useful in parts of the country that don’t have major hospitals or specialists.
With a 90 percent accuracy rate, the technology “allows the classification of a large number of images in a very short time, at low cost”, Mustapha Hamdi, an academic and one of the platform’s developers, told the AFP.
“The more images we upload to the platform, the more exact and reliable it becomes.”