By Jessica Colarossi
From measles, to influenza, to mpox, to malaria—infectious diseases outbreaks are happening all over the world, at nearly all times. For health professionals and public health officials, staying up-to-date with pathogens that are particularly dangerous—or have the potential to become a pandemic, like COVID-19 did—is vitally important to help keep us all safe. But accessing real-time information on outbreaks, as they pop up around the globe, isn’t always simple; currently, much of it is aggregated by hand.
To improve the way disease outbreaks are communicated, Boston University researchers and collaborators at Boston Children’s Hospital are launching a new artificial intelligence–powered surveillance platform, the Biothreats Emergence, Analysis and Communications Network (BEACON), to monitor and analyze infectious diseases threats around the world. It’s led by infectious diseases expert and physician Nahid Bhadelia, who has experienced firsthand the importance of global disease surveillance, having treated patients during multiple Ebola outbreaks in West and East Africa and worked on containment and prevention of Zika, COVID-19, and other pathogens.
College of Engineering Distinguished Professor of Engineering, Ioannis Paschalidis, ECE, and his team at the BU Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering, which he directs, trained the LLM to filter out any non-disease related information and assess the quality of its sources, so it’s intelligent enough to give each report a risk score related to the importance and severity of a potential pathogen.
“We infused the LLM with knowledge about infectious diseases to accurately answer the questions we need the model to answer,” says Paschalidis, “This will provide very fast and very accurate reporting of outbreaks.” Building the cloud-based software pipeline for BEACON was done with the help of the Hariri Institute–based Software & Application Innovation Lab (SAIL), a software development incubator for BU research projects.
Paschalidis now codirects BEACON and oversees its technical and computing capabilities. He is confident that the system will not only speed up global disease surveillance, but also alert experts about regional issues, such as the current outbreaks of measles localized in communities in Texas, New York, and a handful of other US states.
Read the full story at the Brink