Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (Drap) Chief Executive Officer Asim Rauf on Saturday said the body has granted approval to a locally invented software that can "detect the coronavirus infection in a person's lungs within a minute".

According to the certificate of registration granted by Drap, a copy of which is available with Dawn.com, the Cov-Raid — which has been developed by the National Electronics Complex of Pakistan — "shall employ Convolutional Neural Networks to predict [presence of] COVID-19 in suspected individuals" by using X-rays and it has been approved for "secondary detection" of the virus.

The Cov-raid website says the artificial intelligence (AI) technology was developed by "creating a data repository of chest X-rays (CXR) for COVID-19 or non-COVID-19 detection", adding that the software "requires a chest X-ray image as an input for the detection of COVID-19 positive or negative patients in less than one minute".

https://www.dawn.com/news/1591603/drap-okays-locally-developed-ai-software-that-uses-chest-x-ray-to-detect-covid-19-in-under-a-minute