Artificial intelligence to prevent future pandemics

AI advances could tackle future disease outbreaks, says international study.

The COVID-19 crisis may already be a few years behind us. But questions inevitably arise if we’re adequately prepared for a future pandemic. AI is radically changing the way we live and work. It’s also poised to change research in infectious diseases. Can AI also make its mark on pandemic preparedness?

It’s all in the preparation

A study claims that AI offers the potential to revolutionise how we prepare for pandemics. The research was led by the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom in collaboration with academic, industry and policy organisations from Europe, Africa, the United States, Asia and Australia. The paper was published in the journal ‘Nature’. In the first study of its kind, the global team of researchers presented how advances in AI can speed up breakthroughs in infectious disease research and outbreak response. In doing so, AI will ultimately save more lives. The focus was on safety, accountability and ethics in delivering and using AI for infectious disease research. To date, AI in medicine has mostly concentrated on individual patient care. In contrast, this study took into account the use of AI in population health. “In the next five years, AI has the potential to transform pandemic preparedness,” co-lead author Moritz Kraemer from the University of Oxford’s Pandemic Sciences Institute stated in a news release. “It will help us better anticipate where outbreaks will start and predict their trajectory, using terabytes of routinely collected climatic and socio-economic data. It might also help predict the impact of disease outbreaks on individual patients by studying the interactions between the immune system and emerging pathogens.” He added: “Taken together and if integrated into countries’ pandemic response systems, these advances will have the potential to save lives and ensure the world is better prepared for future pandemic threats.” In addition, the research showed that the latest advances in AI methodologies are doing progressively better, despite limited data.

Joining forces

The authors proposed rigorous criteria for evaluating AI models. They also supported strong cooperation among government, society, industry and academia to develop sustainable and practical models for enhancing human health. “While AI has remarkable transformative potential for pandemic mitigation, it is dependent upon extensive worldwide collaboration and from comprehensive, continuous surveillance data inputs,” explained author Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in California. “Infectious disease outbreaks remain a constant threat, but AI offers policymakers a powerful new set of tools to guide informed decisions on when and how to intervene,” concluded co-lead author Samir Bhatt from the University of Copenhagen and Imperial College London.

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More information: CORDIS.