Published in Nature, the research featured input from scientists across Africa, America, Asia, Australia, and Europe. It claims that within the next five years, AI systems could save lives by anticipating the location and trajectory of disease outbreaks.
According to the study, recent advances in AI have seen it performing increasingly well even with limited data. However, improvements in data quality could see even greater gains made in the coming years.
“In the next five years, AI has the potential to transform pandemic preparedness,” said lead author Professor Moritz Kraemer, from the University of Oxford’s Pandemic Sciences Institute.
“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.”
According to the study, opportunities for AI include:
- Improving current models of disease spread
- Pinpointing areas of high-transmission potential
- Improving genetic data in disease surveillance and accelerating vaccine development
- Determining the properties of new pathogens and predicting their traits
- Predicting which treatments and vaccines are best
- Using population-level data– including wearable technologies such as heart rate and step counts from individuals – to better detect and monitor outbreaks
The researchers warned that AI alone will not solve infectious disease challenges, but that integration of human feedback into AI modelling workflows might help overcome existing limitations.
In addition, the authors of the study raised concerns about the quality and representativeness of training data, the limited accessibility of AI models to the wider community, and potential risks associated with the deployment of black-box models for decision making.
“While AI has remarkable transformative potential for pandemic mitigation, it is dependent upon extensive worldwide collaboration and from comprehensive, continuous surveillance data inputs,” said study author Professor Eric Topol, MD, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute.
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