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)—based at BU’s Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases (CEID)—speeds up the process by pulling in data from myriad sources, including direct submissions from public health experts around the world. CEID’s globally based outbreak analysts then select and investigate critical reports to share, using artificial intelligence to sift the information, assign a potential threat level, and produce a draft written summary that can be edited and contextualized by subject matter experts.
CEID developed BEACON in partnership with BU’s Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering and Boston Children’s Hospital, which both help operate it today.
“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, CEID founder, 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 CEID’s infectious disease researchers and a Hariri team, who designed PandemIQ, a form of AI known as a large language model, to help power the workflow of human experts on BEACON. The program 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.