IN the next five years, integrating AI into country response systems could save more lives by anticipating the location and trajectory of disease outbreaks. A global group of researchers call for better collaboration between academia, government, and industry, to ensure safety, accountability and ethics in the use of AI in infectious disease research.
A study published in Nature 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 scientists from the University of Oxford 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.
