IIT-Palakkad develops ultrasound for COVID-19 screening

Indian Institutes of Technology, Palakkad, has developed an automated lung ultrasound (LUS) for COVID-19 screening and monitoring through cloud-based image analysis and scoring system.

Daily Current Affairs Quiz 2020

Key-Points

The app, the first of its kind in India, is now available for clinicians to perform automated analysis by just uploading the ultrasound video.

A nursing assistant (in the absence of a skilled clinician), following a simple protocol of LUS, acquires the lung images and transfers the images to the cloud.

The images are analysed over the cloud and scores are assigned according to certain criteria either for the type of infection or its severity.

The methodology would be extremely useful in time-critical COVID-19 working conditions, where clinicians have time limitations in manually evaluating ultrasound videos of all patients.

The approach is not only restricted to COVID-19 detection but also helps to identify other lung infections.