A study published in Nature today outlines for the first time how advances in AI can accelerate breakthroughs in infectious disease research and outbreak response.
The study – which is published following last week’s AI Action Summit and amidst increasing global debate on AI investment and regulation – puts particular emphasis on safety, accountability and ethics in the deployment and use of AI in infectious disease research.
Calling for a collaborative and transparent environment – both in terms of datasets and AI models – the study is a partnership between PSI and University of Oxford scientists and colleagues from academia, industry and policy organisations across Africa, America, Asia, Australia and Europe.
So far, medical applications of AI have predominantly focused on individual patient care, enhancing for example clinical diagnostics, precision medicine, or supporting clinical treatment decisions.
This review instead considers the use of AI in population health. The study finds that recent advances in AI methodologies are performing increasingly well even with limited data – a major bottleneck to date. Better performance on noisy and limited data is opening new areas for AI tools to improve health across both high-income and low-income countries.
Lead author Professor Moritz Kraemer from the University of Oxford’s Pandemic Sciences Institute, said: “In the next five years, AI has the potential to transform pandemic preparedness.
“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.
“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.”
Read the full story on the Pandemic Sciences Institute webpage.