You can see all my publications in my Google Scholar profile.
I’m currently part of the Visualization group, at the Center for Artificial Intelligence in Public Health Research, ZKI-PH, at the Robert Koch Institute. The group is led by PD. Dr. Georges Hattab, my advisor.
PhD#
Title: Unsupervised Learning for Surveillance Indicators
Monitoring patient symptoms is crucial for tracking diseases and detecting potential outbreaks. Public health experts use a set of criteria called syndromes, which are defined by symptoms, disease codes, and clinical conditions. These syndromes represent various diseases, such as COVID-19 and influenza. The data collected through these syndromic criteria is then aggregated and shared with the Ministry of Health and the public to help monitor and manage the spread of infectious diseases. However, defining these syndromes is a labor-intensive manual process. Unsupervised machine learning offers a solution by aiming to find patterns in the data and propose new surveillance indicators, like syndromes. These machine-generated syndromes can then be used to identify outbreaks and epidemics as early as possible.
Keywords: syndromic surveillance, unsupervised learning
Publications#
More to come. Stay tuned!
Ferreira, A.P.G., Anžel, A., de Souza, I.O.M., Hughes, H., Elliot, A.J., Kong, J.D., Schranz, M., Ullrich, A., Hattab, G. (2026). The Open Syndrome Definition, arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.25434. (in review)
Ferreira, A. P. G., Anžel, A., Ullrich, A., Hattab, G (2026). Advocating the potential of artificial intelligence for syndrome discovery in syndromic surveillance systems: A scoping review, iScience, 2026; 29.
Ferreira, A. P. G., Anžel, A., Ullrich, A., Hattab, G (2024). Explorando o potencial da inteligência artificial na definição de síndromes (Abstract), Anais do Instituto de Higiene e Medicina Tropical, (accepted).
Presentations#
- Poster exhibition at the Conferência de Saúde Pública da Lusofonia (pre-conference for the European Public Health Conference) on November 11, 2024.
- Presentation at the event “From Lessons Learned to Innovative Methods: Strengthening the Exchange of Syndromic Surveillance Systems Globally (SSSG)” (pre-conference for the European Public Health Conference) on November 12, 2024.
Applications#
More coming up soon!
- Open Syndrome Initiative A collaborative initiative to standardize and modernize disease surveillance through machine-readable case definitions
- Peneira: bulk search papers for you next literature review