Artificial intelligence–enabled public health surveillance—from local detection to global epidemic monitoring and control

Artificial intelligence (AI) techniques have been widely applied to infectious disease outbreak detection and early warning, trend prediction, and public health response modeling and assessment. Such public health surveillance and response tasks of major importance pose unique technical challenges such as data sparsity, lack of positive training samples, difficulty in developing baselines and quantifying the control measures, and interwoven dependencies between spatiotemporal elements and finer-grained risk analyses through contact and social networks. Traditional public health surveillance relies heavily on statistical techniques. Recent years have seen tremendous growth of AI-enabled methods, including but not limited to deep learning–based models, complementing statistical approaches. This chapter aims to provide a systematic review of these recent advances applying AI techniques to address public health surveillance and response challenges.