Using Artificial Intelligence in Infection Prevention

Purpose of review: Artificial intelligence (AI) offers huge potential in infection prevention and control (IPC). We explore its potential IPC benefits in epidemiology, laboratory infection diagnosis, and hand hygiene.

Recent findings: AI has the potential to detect transmission events during outbreaks or predict high-risk patients, enabling development of tailored IPC interventions. AI offers opportunities to enhance diagnostics with objective pattern recognition, standardize the diagnosis of infections with IPC implications, and facilitate the dissemination of IPC expertise. AI hand hygiene applications can deliver behavior change, though it requires further evaluation in different clinical settings. However, staff can become dependent on automatic reminders, and performance returns to baseline if feedback is removed.

Summary: Advantages for IPC include speed, consistency, and capability of handling infinitely large datasets. However, many challenges remain; improving the availability of high-quality representative datasets and consideration of biases within preexisting databases are important challenges for future developments. AI in itself will not improve IPC; this requires culture and behavior change. Most studies to date assess performance retrospectively so there is a need for prospective evaluation in the real-life, often chaotic, clinical setting. Close collaboration with IPC experts to interpret outputs and ensure clinical relevance is essential.