Coronavirus latest: Russia clocks record Covid death toll as Delta strain spreads

Jake Lever spotted a gap in the market halfway through two years of postdoctoral research at Stanford University’s department of bioengineering.

Noticing last April that colleagues were finding it hard to sift through the mountains of literature published on coronavirus every day, he put his skills as a “biomedical text miner” to work. Four months later, CoronaCentral.ai was born.

The website, which has since received funding from the Chan Zuckerberg BioHub research centre, uses deep learning, a subset of artificial intelligence, to compile and categorise published Covid-19 papers and preprints.

“There’s so much [information] out there that it was a huge challenge to find what you want,” Lever said. But by putting it all in different topics and linking it to esteem metrics, it is easier to see what’s being read, he added.

CoronaCentral may now rely on artificial intelligence but it required plenty of human toil to begin with. To “train” the system, Lever spent weeks sorting about 3,200 research papers into categories such as “reviews”, “epidemiology” and “meta-analysis”.

“Language processing systems work best when you provide them with concrete, gold standard examples of what you want,” he said. “You get a lot of coffee, you sit down and you just start.”

Trends emerge among the more than 150,000 papers gathered by the website since the pandemic began. Forecasting research employing mathematical models to predict the spread of the virus in different settings has tapered off as the focus shifts to analysing the effects of long Covid.

Articles discussing how to adapt medical practice during the pandemic are also common, Lever said. “So many people are writing things like ‘we do colorectal cancer surgery, how should we do it now?’”

Given that scientists are “increasingly required to undertake interdisciplinary research”, Lever believes websites such as CoronaCentral will play a large role in how they digest the latest discoveries.

“With the pace of research, it’s infeasible for a single scientist to keep up to date in many areas,” he said.

Lever last month traded California for Glasgow for a position lecturing at the university’s school of computing science, close to where he grew up. His PhD was in bioinformatics, a subject he describes as “using computers to analyse DNA sequences, spot patterns, identify mutations, or in Covid’s case, analyse variants”.

Sequence analysis has become “so ubiquitous and easy and practical to do that we are able to study variants like we wouldn’t have been able to at all 10 years ago”, Lever added. “In my eyes, we are in a very lucky place.”

This is the 10th article in a series for the blog that explores the effects of the pandemic on people and businesses around the world