Led by Dr. Aaron Golden from the National University of Ireland, Galway, the team plans to develop new artificial intelligence (AI) software to expedite the diagnosis of COVID-19 from chest CT scans.

Nasal and throat swabs, the traditional methods for detecting COVID-19, are not 100% accurate, and often patients don't receive their results for a day or two. However, using a CT scan, a radiologist can tell in less than an hour if a patient has lung lesions indicative of COVID-19, Golden said.

The question becomes the following: Are the lesions due to pneumonia, a pulmonary disorder, or another lung condition? That's where AI comes in, as well as the necessity of Kay's supercomputing power. A convolutional neural network classifies CT scans into likely COVID-19 or non-COVID-19 groups, and then a deep-learning algorithm standardizes the thousands of training CT scans.

Golden's project was funded by the Health Research Board as part of the COVID-19 Pandemic Rapid Response Funding Call.