Digital Medicine for Infectious Diseases

Recent years have seen an increasing shift from centralized laboratory diagnostics to decentralized point-of-care testing, a shift which has the potential to increase health equity. Here the authors provide their perspective on how the integration of machine learning and artificial intelligence with point-of-care technologies can - and could - support this transition

Mesinovic et al. use AI foundation models to implement heart disease screening in people living with HIV in Vietnam, relying on low-cost wearable sensors. This approach achieves promising discriminative ability and requires only lightweight local training, potentially enabling affordable screening in resource-limited clinics.

The 2022 global mpox outbreak underscored the challenge of distinguishing between monkeypox virus infection and vaccination-induced immunity due to cross-reactive antibodies. Here, the authors develop a machine learning-assisted serological assay that differentiates MPXV infection from vaccination, achieving 88% specificity and 92% sensitivity, paving the way for seroepidemiological studies with improved resolution.

Authors analyzed malaria and tuberculosis drugs to create a pharmacometric model. They used an AI pipeline that prioritized pharmacogenetic drug-gene pairs with an emphasis on high variant frequency genes in an African population.

In a prospective study enrolling 1,222 patients from 22 emergency departments, a device using a machine-learning-based signature of blood mRNAs demonstrated clinically acceptable performance to diagnose bacterial and viral infections and to predict the all-cause need for critical care interventions within 7 days, with benchmark to established biomarkers and risk scores.

Higgins et al. present an AI tool that uses patient data to personalise treatment for Helicobacter pylori, the leading agent of gastric cancer, demonstrating improved eradication rates over prescribed therapies in retrospective clinical analysis.

Page et al., use wearable biosensors to monitor vital sign trends in patients with Lassa fever in Sierra Leone. Tachycardia and reduced heart rate variability associate with poor outcomes, though technical limitations hinder broader implementation.

In a large trial involving 180 classes in different contexts in China, interactions with a chatbot provided to parents increased uptake and appointments for human papillomavirus vaccination, with stronger increases in rural areas.