Darwin AI

The team’s Generative Synthesis platform leverages AI to reduce the complexity and guesswork in designing efficient, high performance deep neural networks for real world applications.

Darwin AI has collaborated with the University of Waterloo’s VIP Lab to develop COVID-Net.  This is a convolutional neural network that detects COVID-19 using chest radiography. DarwinAI is also making this technology open source.

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to have a devastating effect on the health and well-being of the global population. A critical step in the fight against COVID-19 is effective screening of infected patients, with one of the key screening approaches being radiological imaging using chest radiography. It was found in early studies that patients present abnormalities in chest radiography images that are characteristic of those infected with COVID-19. Motivated by this, a number of artificial intelligence (AI) systems based on deep learning have been proposed and results have been shown to be quite promising in terms of accuracy in detecting patients infected with COVID-19 using chest radiography images. However, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, these developed AI systems have been closed source and unavailable to the research community for deeper understanding and extension, and unavailable for public access and use. Therefore, in this study we introduce COVID-Net, a deep convolutional neural network design tailored for the detection of COVID-19 cases from chest radiography images that is open source and available to the general public.

The COVID-Net models provided in the data set are intended to be used as reference models that can be built upon and enhanced as new data becomes available. They are currently at a research stage and not yet intended as production-ready models (not meant for direct clinicial diagnosis), and we are working continuously to improve them as new data becomes available. Please do not use COVID-Net for self-diagnosis and seek help from your local health authorities.

Currently, the COVID-Net team is working on COVID-RiskNet, a deep neural network tailored for COVID-19 risk stratification. Stay tuned as we make it available soon.

Company Type: Academia Startup

Region: US & Canada

Industry Category: Covid 19 Healthcare Medical Imaging

Research: Research on Deep Neural Networks

Data set: Covid Net

Product: GENSYNTH Platform

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