Starting in 2019, Lebanon has been grappling with a severe economic crisis that was further compounded by the COVID -19 pandemic. This combination of factors has led to the deterioration of public infrastructure and limited access to healthcare, exacerbating the resurgence of specific pandemic situations, including recent cases of Cholera.

In contrast to the escalating and emerging risks of pandemics, the national surveillance system is facing challenges due to insufficient resources and fragmentation. Moreover, it heavily relies on self-reporting of diseases and lab results by healthcare institutions and laboratories and adopts a conventional epidemiological analysis of data. Unfortunately, this approach suffers from several weaknesses, such as low sensitivity, limited comprehensiveness, data validity issues, and delays in disease detection.

The objective of the research project is to enhance Lebanon’s pandemic preparedness by harnessing AI-driven tools directly linked to laboratory data. The aim is to enable swift detection of early trends in high-risk communicable diseases and provide automated interpretation and analysis of disease outbreaks, encompassing Acute Flaccid Paralysis, Cholera, Hepatitis, Hemorrhagic fevers, Food poisoning, Meningitis, COVID-19, and extensively drug-resistant organisms.

During the initial phase, the focus will be on collaborating with a university hospital laboratory to develop and validate a prototype of such a system, adhering to the standards set by the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health (MoPH). This endeavor will involve a diverse panel of experts from various fields, including laboratory medicine, microbiology, internal medicine/infectious diseases, medical informatics, and epidemiology. International collaboration will be sought, and an MoPH expert will also be integrated to ensure the evaluation of this solution’s suitability for national implementation.