KOTA KINABALU: An epidemiologist from here has upgraded his dengue predictor tool by using artificial intelligence programme.
Early this year, the 31-year-old Dr Dhesi Raja developed a mobile application to predict dengue outbreak in Malaysia.
The application named as Dengue Index Model was developed with the helps by Professor Ting Choo Yee and Dr Peter Ho from Malaysia Multimedia University.
Several organisations including Google offered him a two-month scholarship at Singularity University at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) Research Park in Silicon Valley, US to further develop his innovation.
During the Graduate Studies programme in US, Dr Raja teamed up with other researchers Jamal Robinson (US), Zhen Zhang (US and China) as well Rainer Mallol (Dominican Republic) to produce better version of predictor tool known as Artificial Intelligence Medical Epidemiology.
“For this project, we train computers to understand how diseases and data behave.
“(From the correlations of several variables), the artificial intelligence will notify the public on when and where are the next deadly infectious diseases to erupt,” he told the New Straits Times.
AIME’s platforms can geo-locate exactly up to 400-metre radius on the possible outbreak areas for up to three months in advance.
It will also distribute educational information and outbreak warnings to public via short messages services and online.
The platform achieved 88.6 per cent accuracy when it was tested with open source data in Malaysia such as weather, hotspots, and dengue cases.
Dr Raja added the team had also set up a corporation at the Silicon Valley.
“We will look for business partner to fund the research development targeting countries badly affected by dengue.
“The future plan is to improve the platform for other diseases such as HIV, tuberculosis, malaria and flu.”