TORONTO -- A Canadian company鈥檚 advanced artificial intelligence system was among the first in the world to notice the new coronavirus emerging from China, beating international health authorities.
uses AI to scour more than 100,000 articles every day in 65 languages looking for news about more than 150 different diseases. Around 10 a.m. EST on Dec. 31, their system spotted an article in Chinese about a 鈥減neumonia of unknown cause鈥� with 27 cases.
鈥淲e didn鈥檛 know at that moment that this would turn into what it has, but we knew it had the ingredients to become something,鈥� Dr. Khan explained to CTVNews.ca in a phone interview.
The very same day, BlueDot issued an alert to its clients. That warning came nearly a week before the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization issued their public alerts about the novel coronavirus.
The company鈥檚 analysis of the likely destinations for the spread of the disease was
鈥淭he cities up at the top of the list at highest risk were the first cities that received the coronavirus after it started to spread out of China, places like Tokyo, Hong Kong, Seoul, Taipei and Macau, et cetera,鈥� Dr.Khan said.
HOW THEY DID IT
BlueDot conducts surveillance of infectious diseases from official sources reported by government agencies, through the public health and healthcare community, online forums and world media, Dr. Khan explained.
鈥淭he internet is an important medium for gathering unofficial information, but it鈥檚 so vast,鈥� he said.
Once the data is collected, a team of experts at BlueDot then sift through the information and review a handful of what Dr. Khan called 鈥渘eedles in the haystack.鈥�
鈥淥nce we think that the potential threat is legitimate we enter that into our platform and it automatically connects to the whole world鈥檚 air travel data,鈥� said Dr. Khan, who also works as a professor of medicine and public health at the University of Toronto.
鈥淣ow we can analyze hundreds of millions or even billions of pieces of data and then instantly map out the places where this particular outbreak might go to next.鈥�
Dr. Khan was starting his career as a doctor and scientist at Toronto鈥檚 St. Michael鈥檚 Hospital during the SARS outbreak in Canada, which killed 44 people.
鈥淚t was a profound event where I had a chance first hand to see a colleague of mine get SARS. Thankfully she survived,鈥� Dr. Khan said.
Khan spent the next decade studying outbreaks with an emphasis on how they might spread through commercial air travel.
With the creation of BlueDot, the company aims to disseminate information faster than the diseases can spread. The company鈥檚 clients include Canadian government agencies, health and security departments, and businesses.
The coronavirus has now infected more than 34,576 people globally and killed more than 722, almost all of them in China.
Dr. Khan said multiple converging global forces are responsible for the spread of the virus, including population growth, urbanization, climate change and air travel.
鈥淥ne of the biggest drivers is the mass consumption of animals, in particular wildlife,鈥� he said. 鈥淭hese are the spill-over events where viruses in wild animals get into humans. This was the same story 17 years ago that it is now, so Mother Nature is trying to tell us something.
鈥淭he flip side of that is that we鈥檙e also in an era of increasing access to data, things like advanced analytics (and) AI to makes sense of data and digital technologies to communicate information.
鈥淭here鈥檚 never been a period in human history with the magnitude and scale of outbreaks that we have seen in the past 20 years.鈥�
The company鈥檚 name, BlueDot, is a metaphor for our small world,
Established in 2014, BlueDot now employs 40 people -- a mix of science, technology and healthcare experts.
