A major new international study has explored how AI can be used in infectious disease research and outbreak response, including preparedness for future pandemics.
The review, led by researchers from the University of Oxford, said that recent technological advances meant that AI methodologies were proving increasingly effective even with limited data.
The researchers said that where most use cases of medical AI involved individual care such as diagnosing illnesses, this review looked at the role of AI in population health.
Lead author Professor Moritz Kraemer from the University of Oxford’s Pandemic Sciences Institute said that AI had the potential to transform pandemic preparedness over the next five years.
The technology could be used to anticipate where outbreaks might start and to model their possible trajectories, he added.
It could also be used to predict the potential effects of emerging diseases on individuals by analysing interactions between the immune system and emerging pathogens.
Professor Kraemer said that if these approaches were combined and built into pandemic response systems, they “have the potential to save lives and ensure the world is better prepared for future pandemic threats”.
Study identified specific opportunities for AI in pandemic preparedness
The review identified a number of areas where advances in AI could help to improve pandemic preparedness.
These included improving current models of disease spread and pinpointing areas with the potential for high levels of transmission of an emerging infection.
This could provide more accurate models and allow limited healthcare resources to be deployed in the most effective way.
AI could also be used to accelerate the development of new or modified vaccines, help to analyse the properties of new pathogens, and predict whether they will be able or likely to jump across species.
It could also predict variants of known pathogens including coronavirus and influenza, helping to develop treatments and vaccines to mitigate their impact.
AI could be used in conjunction with other technologies such as wearable health monitors to feed individual-level data into population-level analysis.
The study said that AI could also serve as a bridge between healthcare professionals with limited training and highly technical science and data.
The researchers did urge caution in suggesting that AI alone could counter emerging diseases, expressing concern about the availability of and quality of training data and the limited accessibility of some AI models across the global community.
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