Medical software for precision diagnostics of infection with immunoprofiling and artificial intelligence

Abstract

What does it take to realize one-click precision diagnostics across infections? Traditional biomedical methods often are limited to detect a single pathogen at a time, thus neglecting the complex dynamics of the immune response and its degrees of individuality, the host-microbe interactions, and the connection to other disease-states that can significantly affect diagnoses. Here we review methods employed in the clinical microbiology laboratory, sequencing and machine learning technologies, that enable precision diagnostics of infectious diseases. We provide a roadmap of the regulatory pathways and touch upon engineering requirements necessary for developing and bringing to market a medical software for physicians and citizens. We anticipate that high-throughput sequencing technologies, together with artificial intelligence, unlock the use of complex information of the immune response at the single-molecule level thus enable the precise diagnosis of multiple infections, the predictions of clinical outcomes based on individual immune baselines, microbial colonization, and therapeutic history. These methods, combined in a medical software, hold the potential to concomitantly diagnose and predict the clinical course of additional immune-related diseases such as cancer and autoimmunity. Thus, uncovering the immunity-interface to several diseases can have a direct impact on population immunity, One Health, and pandemic preparedness.