A wing of Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and a healthcare initiative formed by Indian and Norwegian governments have launched a study to detect coronavirus infection from cough sounds of people using artificial intelligence (AI), an official said.

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A mobile App has been developed by Norway-India Partnership Initiative, in which people who are not infected by the virus are recording their cough sound, while researchers have collected such sounds from COVID-19 patients. An analysis using AI will be conducted on the mixed database of cough sound samples to find out a coronavirus infected person, Director of Regional Medical Research Centre (RMRC), Dr Sanghamitra Pati, said on July 24.

The RMRC of Bhubaneswar is a permanent research centre of ICMR. "A similar study was conducted in case of x-ray analysis of pneumonia patients in the past. The goal was to identify which is the x-ray of a pneumonia case and which is not," Pati said. People of Odisha have started participating in the study using the App, she said.