Food safety breakthrough announced

IBM has today announced what it claims is a ’first-of-a-kind system’ that is designed to help food retailers, distributors and public health officials predict the most likely contaminated food sources and accelerate the investigation of food-borne disease outbreaks.

The system combines algorithms, visualisation and statistical techniques to analyse information on the date and location of billions of supermarket food items sold each week to quickly identify with high probability a set of potentially ’guilty’ products within as few as 10 outbreak case reports, IBM says.

“This research illustrates an approach to create significant improvements without the need for any regulatory changes

BFR’s Bernd Appel

This research was published today in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS Computational Biology in collaboration with partners from Johns Hopkins University, Purdue University and the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BFR).

Combining petabytes of retail data with public health reports, IBM scientists built a system that automatically identifies, contextualises and displays data from multiple sources to help reduce the time to identify the mostly likely contaminated sources by a factor of days or weeks, the company claims.

The algorithm is designed to effectively ’learn’ from every new report and re-calculates the probability of each food that might be causing a food-borne illness.

“Predictive analytics based on location, content, and context are driving our ability to quickly discover hidden patterns and relationships from diverse public health and retail data,” said James Kaufman, manager of public health research for IBM Research.

In an accompanying video (see above), IBM scientists simulated 60,000 outbreaks of food-borne disease across 600 products using real-world food sales data from Germany to demonstrate the system’s effectiveness.

Unfortunately, a simulation cannot accurately report a food safety outbreak as real-life cases do not show up all at once - as portrayed in the demonstration.

“This research illustrates an approach to create significant improvements without the need for any regulatory changes,” said Bernd Appel, head of the department for biological safety, BFR, who worked alongside IBM to help produce the system simulation.

“This can be achieved by combining innovative software technology with already existing data and the willingness to share this information in crisis situations between private and public sector organisations.”

Looking forward, Kaufman told Laboratorytalk.com that although this project is not designed to detect supply-chain contamination, future IBM research projects will have that capability.