Themed issue on: Using generative AI in epidemiological studies, infectious disease surveillance or outbreak response

Guest Editor: Albert Jan van Hoek, National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), The Netherlands

Epidemiological studies, infectious disease surveillance and the response to outbreaks require timely situational awareness and fast, thorough action to maximize beneficial impact. Applying innovations that can make one or several steps of this process faster or more effective is, therefore, of great interest to the public health community.

Recent developments in generative AI (with tools such as large language models) offer such potential. Due to their language understanding capabilities, they allow for more intuitive and user-centric interaction with code and data and could provide support to the end user in their local language. This enables faster and better implementation of (new) techniques and quicker dissemination of results.

For this special issue of Epidemiology & Infection, we invite papers that explore or evaluate the (potential) use of generative AI tools in epidemiological analysis, infectious disease surveillance or any step of epidemiological outbreak investigation. We aim to cover as many aspects as possible.

Please register your interest in submitting a manuscript to this special issue by contacting the editorial office at epidemiologyandinfection@cambridge.org. Please include the following details:

• Lead author;
• Short summary;
• Estimated month of submission.

The final date for submission of papers will be notified in due course to all those who have registered interest.