As new technology reveals what couldn’t be seen before, we’re also looking at its future impacts on public health.
CDC is exploring new applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) for public health, such as forecasting trends in opioid overdose mortality, using natural language processing methods on foodborne outbreak data, and using large language models to improve syndromic surveillance.
These cutting-edge technologies offer huge benefits for public health. They can help process massive amounts of data that are hard for humans to do at scale. We can also discover relationships in the data that are hard for traditional methods to find.
As we incorporate more artificial intelligence into our data workflows, we also need to look at how to prevent potential biases in the data that may impact health equity. (author introduction)