Medical-AI trial: an international consensus on AI-enabled emergency research for emerging infectious diseases — risk perception to decision-making (NCT07678619)

Emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases such as COVID-19, mpox, and dengue spread fast, have wide impact, and are poorly understood early on. In such events, how quickly danger is sensed, situations are assessed, and sound judgments are made under limited evidence can shape public health outcomes.

The COVID-19 experience also exposed challenges: information becomes fragmented, risk perception lags, assessment leans on individual experience, and complex decision-making grows inefficient.

This study responds to those challenges with a framework where AI supports research and decision-making. Per the registry summary, the goal is to establish a smart-technology system covering the whole flow of risk perception, situational assessment, intelligent decision-making, and comprehensive evaluation.

Unlike a usual clinical trial that measures a treatment effect in individual patients, its focus is a framework for running emergency clinical research and decisions quickly and systematically, and the international consensus around it. It is an international effort enrolling 780 by invitation.

In emergency infectious-disease response, the foundation of how quickly and accurately research and judgment can be run, not treatment alone, strongly shapes outcomes. Reinforcing that foundation with AI and, moreover, setting it not as one country operation but as an international consensus, is a modern design for public-health infrastructure that prepares for the next outbreak.

That said, this study is at the stage of building consensus and a framework; it does not establish the effectiveness or superiority of any specific AI.