A study, titled Artificial intelligence for modelling infectious disease epidemics, published in Nature outlines for the first time how advances in AI can accelerate breakthroughs in infectious disease research and outbreak response.
Opportunities for AI and pandemic preparedness identified in the research include:
- Promising advances in improving current models of disease spread, aiming to make modelling more robust, accurate and realistic.
- Progress in pinpointing areas of high-transmission potential, helping ensure limited healthcare resources can be allocated in the most efficient possible way.
- Potential to improve genetic data in disease surveillance, ultimately accelerating vaccine development and the identification of new variants.
- Potential to help determine the properties of new pathogens, predict their traits and identify whether cross species jumps are likely.
- Predicting which new variants of already-circulating pathogens – such as SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses – might arise, and which treatments and vaccines are best in reducing their impact.
- Possible AI-aided integration of population-level data with data from individual-level sources – including wearable technologies such as heart rate and step counts – to better detect and monitor outbreaks.
- AI can create a new interface between the highly technical science and healthcare professionals with limited training, improving capacity in settings that need these tools the most.
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