Above: Using AI and an international network of experts to identify and communicate outbreaks, BEACON shores up global defenses, to prevent the next pandemic.
BU researchers collaborate to create the first infectious disease surveillance system combining the power of AI with human experts
Even in the post-COVID world, healthcare professionals rely mainly on data aggregated by hand to inform them about infectious disease outbreaks around the globe.
The Biothreats Emergence, Analysis, and Communications Network (BEACON), developed by BU researchers in collaboration with Boston Children’s Hospital, speeds up the process by pulling in data from myriad sources and using artificial intelligence to sift the information, assign a potential threat level, and produce a written summary.
Each report is then vetted by subject matter experts—people who decide if it should be published on the BEACON website or needs additional investigation.
“We live in an age of epidemics—we know this from the frequency of these events happening and the interconnectivity of the world,” says Nahid Bhadelia, founder of BU’s Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases, founding director of BEACON, and a Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine associate professor of medicine.
“We live in an age of epidemics—we know this from the frequency of these events happening and the interconnectivity of the world.”
Enabling faster response required collaboration between BU’s infectious disease researchers and a team at BU’s Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering, who designed BEACON using a form of AI known as a large language model. BEACON also leverages HealthMap, an outbreak-monitoring database created by a team at Children’s that scrapes the web for information.
“This will provide very fast and very accurate reporting of outbreaks,” says Ioannis Paschalidis, a College of Engineering Distinguished Professor of Engineering, director of the Hariri Institute, and a cofounder and codirector of BEACON.