Machine learning in handling disease outbreaks: a comprehensive review

Abstract

The changes in the global environment have made impact on the evolution of infectious diseases, virus mutations, or new diseases which are challenging to be tackled with new technological advances. This work aims to identify and analyze previous studies on machine learning applications in handling disease outbreaks. Bibliometric analysis was conducted on 3,447 scientific articles selected from the Scopus database. Further, latent dirichlet analysis (LDA) method was applied to identify the topic hotspots in attempting to deepen the analysis. The LDA results identified twelve topic hotspots that can be classified into three themes: COVID-19 disease, miscellaneous diseases, and public opinion on disease outbreaks for discussion. The study reveals that the scientific structure of this domain is dominated by machine learning research on COVID-19 diseases and miscellaneous diseases caused by pathogens or some genetic factors. A huge amount of multimodal medical data was used by previous studies for prediction, forecasting, classification, or screening purposes to resolve many problems of diseases, including epidemiological surveillance, diagnosis, treatment, health monitoring, epidemic management, viral infection, and pathogenesis. Public opinions toward new diseases are also an interesting topic in addition to the public perceptions in response to the health protocol and policies.