A survey on deep transfer learning and edge computing for mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Global Health sometimes faces pandemics as are currently facing COVID-19 disease. The spreading and infection factors of this disease are very high. A huge number of people from most of the countries are infected within six months from its first report of appearance and it keeps spreading. The required systems are not ready up to some stages for any pandemic; therefore, mitigation with existing capacity becomes necessary. On the other hand, modern-era largely depends on Artificial Intelligence(AI) including Data Science; and Deep Learning(DL) is one of the current flag-bearer of these techniques. It could use to mitigate COVID-19 like pandemics in terms of stop spread, diagnosis of the disease, drug & vaccine discovery, treatment, patient care, and many more. But this DL requires large datasets as well as powerful computing resources. A shortage of reliable datasets of a running pandemic is a common phenomenon. So, Deep Transfer Learning(DTL) would be effective as it learns from one task and could work on another task. In addition, Edge Devices(ED) such as IoT, Webcam, Drone, Intelligent Medical Equipment, Robot, etc. are very useful in a pandemic situation. These types of equipment make the infrastructures sophisticated and automated which helps to cope with an outbreak. But these are equipped with low computing resources, so, applying DL is also a bit challenging; therefore, DTL also would be effective there. This article scholarly studies the potentiality and challenges of these issues. It has described relevant technical backgrounds and reviews of the related recent state-of-the-art. This article also draws a pipeline of DTL over Edge Computing as a future scope to assist the mitigation of any pandemic.