Smart way to allocate Covid jabs
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CAN AID IN CHOOSING PRIORITIES
ARTIFICIAL Intelligence (AI) could help better determine who should receive the Covid-19 vaccine first, according to researchers.
Experts from the Institute of AI and RiSE (Research in Societal Enhancement) group at De Montfort University said probability modelling – determining how likely something is – can effectively inform AI systems to generate priority lists.
Decisions regarding vaccine prioritisation were left to the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI).
Dr Raymond Moodley, a visiting researcher at the Institute of AI, said: “The availability of approved vaccines has been lauded by many as a game-changer and, inevitably, we have now found ourselves in the position of prioritising who gets the vaccine first.
“Generating these prioritisation groups has been a complex task requiring substantial time and effort by various experts including clinicians, mathematicians and data analysts, as well as government policy advisors. But we think it is possible to achieve a similar outcome using a simplified approach.
“Having a simplified approach not only saves time and effort, but usually makes these approaches more universal, so they would be applicable to scenarios beyond Covid-19.
“Most importantly, a simplified approach makes it more accessible to countries and organisations that do not have access to the expertise and data we have in the UK.”
The model is based on probability theory which considers the likelihood of an event occurring – such as a person dying if they caught Covid.
Colleague Professor Francisco Chiclana said: “Simple, probabilistic modelling can be highly effective, especially on a large scale where trends are less likely to be skewed by individual cases. Public health initiatives, including mass immunisation campaigns, are natural candidates given that the modelling is based on millions of individual data points.”
Dr Moodley said: “By using AI to determine priority, each country and organisation can be certain that the order in which they roll out the vaccine is reflective of the actual probability of their people dying and/or being infected.”