Scientists from around the world, including South Africa, have for the first time shown how advances in artificial intelligence (AI) can prepare the world for the next pandemic.
The study published in Nature recently outlines how AI can accelerate breakthroughs in infectious disease research and outbreak response.
Published amid increasing global debate on AI investment and regulation, the study puts particular emphasis on safety, accountability and ethics in the deployment and use of the tool in infectious disease research.
The scientists have called for a collaborative and transparent environment — both in terms of data sets and AI models.
The study is a partnership between scientists from the University of Oxford and colleagues from academia, industry and policy organisations globally, including from the Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation, School for Data Science and Computational Thinking, Stellenbosch University and African Institute for Mathematical Sciences South Africa in Cape Town.
According to the research, 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 considers the use of AI in population health.
The study found 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” [outliers, errors, inaccuracies ] is opening new areas for AI tools to improve health in both high-income and low-income countries.
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 health-care 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; and
- 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.
Prof Moritz Kraemer from the University of Oxford's Pandemic Sciences Institute, lead author, 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 socioeconomic 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.
While AI has remarkable transformative potential for pandemic mitigation, it is dependent upon extensive worldwide collaboration and from comprehensive, continuous surveillance data inputs
— Prof Eric Topol, study author
“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.”
The scientists urge caution in suggesting AI alone will solve infectious disease challenges, but instead advocate integration of human feedback into AI modelling workflows might help overcome existing limitations.
They are particularly concerned 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.
Study author Prof Eric Topol, MD, founder and 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.”
Study lead author Samir Bhatt from the University of Copenhagen and Imperial College London said infectious disease outbreaks remain a constant threat, but AI offers a powerful new set of tools to guide informed decisions on when and how to intervene.
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.
This comes as Chinese researchers reported finding a new bat coronavirus that is using the same cell-surface protein to gain entry into human cells as the SARS-CoV-2 virus which causes Covid-19, raising the possibility it could someday spread to humans.
According to Reuters, the virus does not enter human cells as readily as SARS-CoV-2 does, the Chinese researchers reported in the journal Cell.
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