AI and Infection Prevention: Expanded Cholera Data Set

AI and Infection Prevention (2024) is an ongoing project by Anna Dumitriu and Alex May in collaboration with Dr James Price (Brighton and Sussex Medical School), Dr Sid Mookerjee (University Hospitals Sussex) and Dr Ashleigh Myall (NEX). The project artistically explores novel new research which offers to improve infection prevention and control (IPC) in hospital settings using artificial intelligence. The artists are exploring how the NEX AI infection prevention system works by creating and applying it to an AI expanded historic data set based on John Snow’s research on the 1854 Cholera outbreak in Broad Street, London, considered to be the first epidemiological study ever conducted. 

The piece comprised portraits of victims of the outbreak generated through an AI-based workflow comprising numerous AI softwares based on Snow's data, as well as a Voronoi map simulation of visits to the cholera infected water pump created employing AI-based vibe coding and inspired by crime scene maps as well as nail-thread art to look for patterns.

The piece is shown alongside the Cholera Dress, an 1850s vintage dress embroidered by the artist and impregnated with the extracted DNA of cholera that she extracted in collaboration with the Wellcome Sanger Institute.

The work was exhibited in the 16th Triennale Kleinplastik: Habitate. Über_Lebensräume which took place in Fellbach, Germany, from 24th May to 28th September 2025.