Advances in artificial intelligence can help us prepare for the next pandemic and save lives, a global group of scientists find.
This study, published today in Nature, outlines how advances in AI can accelerate breakthroughs in infectious disease research and outbreak response.
Following last week's AI Action Summit and amidst increasing global debate on AI investment and regulation, this study puts particular emphasis on safety, accountability and ethics in the deployment and use of AI in infectious disease research.
Collaboration across organisations
Calling for a collaborative and transparent environment – both in terms of datasets and AI models – the study is a partnership between scientists from Imperial College London and colleagues from academia, industry and policy organisations across Africa, America, Asia, Australia and Europe.
Infectious disease outbreaks remain a constant threat, but AI offers policymakers a powerful new set of tools to guide informed decisions Professor Samir Bhatt
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.
Pandemic preparedness
In the next five years, integrating AI into country response systems could save more lives by anticipating the location and trajectory of disease outbreaks. While AI can be used to ensure that the world is better prepared for the next pandemic, the researchers behind the study underline that safety, accountability and ethics should be at the forefront when deploying AI in infectious disease research.
The authors suggest rigorous benchmarks to evaluate AI models, advocating for strong collaborations between government, society, industry and academia for sustainable and practical development of models for improving human health.
Professor Samir Bhatt, lead study author from Imperial College London and the University of Copenhagen, said: "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."
Professor Moritz Kraemer, lead study author 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."
Professor Eric Topol, study author and founding director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, said: "While AI has remarkable transformative potential for pandemic mitigation, it is dependent upon extensive worldwide collaboration and from comprehensive, continuous surveillance data inputs."
