Pakistani scientists have developed a software based on artificial intelligence that can help detect Covid-19 in under a minute, Science Diplomacy Pakistan, a division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, tweeted on Saturday. Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (DRAP) Chief Executive Officer Asim Rauf also Saturday said the body has granted approval to the 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, 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’.