REVIEW article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Digital Public Health
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1601151
This article is part of the Research TopicAdvancing Healthcare AI: Evaluating Accuracy and Future DirectionsView all 7 articles
Harnessing Artificial Intelligence for Enhanced Public Health Surveillance: a narrative review
Provisionally accepted
Vanessa Isabel da Silva Mendes1Beatriz Milhomens de Ferreira Mendes1Rui Pedro Moura1Inês Mota Lourenço1Mariana Ferreira Alves Oliveira1
Kim Lee Ng2
Cátia Sousa Pinto1*- 1Shared Services of the Ministry of Health, Lisboa, Portugal
- 2State Serum Institute (SSI), Copenhagen, Hovedstaden, Denmark
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Artificial intelligence (AI) has a transformative potential to revolutionize public health by addressing critical challenges in disease prevention, outbreak detection, and countermeasures distribution. Traditional public health surveillance methods often face limitations, such as delays in reporting, under-detection of cases, and the overwhelming complexity of managing large datasets. In contrast, AI technologies enable real-time analysis, enhance scalability, and support more effective decision-making, especially during health crises. This review examines the profound impact of AI on key areas of public health, with a particular focus on communicable diseases. It explores how AI-driven technologies are transforming disease monitoring and surveillance, outbreak prevention, and disease modeling, improving the ability to detect and respond to emerging health threats. Furthermore, the role of internet and social media in managing disease outbreaks through AI-powered systems is also highlighted, showcasing how AI can harness information from diverse data sources to enhance public health interventions. The review also delves into the regulatory landscape, emphasizing the importance of robust standards and frameworks, such as those established by the EU, for ensuring the safe, ethical, and responsible implementation of AI in public health. By shedding light on AI's potential to improve real-time decision-making and support health crisis management, this paper underscores its transformative role in shaping the future of public health surveillance and response.
Keywords: Public Health, artificial intelligence, Epidemiology, surveillance, Medical countermeasures, Health threats, Early detection, Social Media Data Public Health
Received: 27 Mar 2025; Accepted: 16 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 da Silva Mendes, Milhomens de Ferreira Mendes, Moura, Mota Lourenço, Ferreira Alves Oliveira, Lee Ng and Sousa Pinto. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Cátia Sousa Pinto, Shared Services of the Ministry of Health, Lisboa, Portugal
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