In the realm of observational clinical systems, where electronic health records (EHRs) and real-world data dominate decision-making pipelines, robust treatment-effect estimation remains a critical challenge. This conceptual manuscript introduces the treatment effect integrity network (TEIN), a novel governance model driven by causal inference principles to orchestrate monitoring, adjustment, and validation of treatment effects within heterogeneous healthcare analytics infrastructures. By integrating causal diagrams, counterfactual reasoning, and dynamic adjustment mechanisms, TEIN addresses biases inherent in observational data, such as confounding and selection effects, without relying on empirical datasets or model training. The architecture emphasizes interoperability across clinical AI systems, facilitating seamless integration into EHR intelligence ecosystems and decision-support pipelines. Key components include a causal mapping layer for identifying potential biases, a governance orchestration module for real-time effect monitoring, and a feedback topology that propagates integrity signals through clinical workflows. Theoretical formulas are presented to interpret risk propagation in causal chains and governance load under varying observational constraints. This model advances AI governance in healthcare by providing a structured approach to maintaining the reliability of treatment effects, ultimately supporting ethical deployment in observational settings. Through literature synthesis, we highlight alignments with existing clinical AI frameworks while underscoring TEIN’s unique focus on causal-driven governance. Implications for clinical practice include enhanced decision confidence and reduced monitoring burdens in resource-constrained environments.
The escalating impacts of climate change on human health necessitate innovative approaches to integrate environmental data with clinical records for enhanced risk assessment and decision-making. This conceptual manuscript proposes the Environmental-Clinical Synergy Risk Orchestrator (ECSRO), a novel intelligence architecture designed for seamless fusion of heterogeneous data sources. Drawing on theoretical foundations in healthcare analytics and AI system infrastructure, ECSRO comprises layered components, including data ingestion gateways, fusion engines, risk intelligence cores, and governance monitors. The architecture addresses interoperability challenges by incorporating standardized exchange frameworks and adaptive governance models, ensuring ethical deployment in clinical workflows. Theoretically, it models risk propagation through interpretive formulas that capture interactions between climatic variables and clinical vulnerabilities, while emphasizing feedback topologies for continuous system refinement. Without empirical evaluations, this work synthesizes the literature on clinical AI ecosystems to highlight ECSRO’s potential to mitigate health risks exacerbated by environmental stressors, such as extreme weather events and pollution. By fostering proactive intelligence, ECSRO aims to transform reactive healthcare into anticipatory systems, promoting resilience in vulnerable populations. Future implications include scalable infrastructure for global health surveillance, underscoring the need for interdisciplinary collaboration in AI-driven integration of environmental and clinical data.
The rapid evolution of foundation models in artificial intelligence presents transformative opportunities for healthcare. Yet, their integration into domain-specific clinical analytics remains fragmented due to challenges in adaptation, interoperability, and governance. This conceptual manuscript proposes the Adaptive Clinical Integration Network (ACIN), a novel framework that facilitates seamless adaptation of foundation models for specialized clinical analytics tasks. ACIN conceptualizes a multi-layered architecture that incorporates domain-specific fine-tuning mechanisms, real-time monitoring loops, and ethical governance protocols to ensure robust integration within healthcare ecosystems. By integrating theoretical insights from clinical AI architectures, electronic health record (EHR) intelligence, and decision support systems, the framework addresses key barriers, including data heterogeneity, model drift, and regulatory compliance. We outline theoretical formulas for risk propagation in adaptation processes, decision confidence aggregation, and governance load distribution, providing interpretive tools for system designers. The implications include enhanced clinical workflow efficiency, improved interoperability across disparate analytics infrastructures, and reduced bias in AI-driven healthcare decisions. This work contributes to the theoretical foundation of AI in medicine by offering a scalable, adaptable model for future clinical analytics deployments, emphasizing ethical and infrastructural resilience without empirical validation. Ultimately, ACIN serves as a blueprint for bridging general-purpose foundation models with domain-tailored clinical applications, fostering innovation in precision medicine and population health analytics.
Traditional public health surveillance often operates within fragmented data silos, leading to delayed outbreak recognition and suboptimal clinical responses. This conceptual systems research article presents the multi-source public health surveillance intelligence mesh (MPSIM). This original architectural paradigm interconnects heterogeneous data ecosystems into a resilient, outbreak-aware intelligence fabric. MPSIM synthesizes multi-modal inputs from electronic health records, genomic repositories, environmental sensors, and social-determinant streams through a theoretically defined mesh topology that supports continuous intelligence propagation and adaptive governance.The framework introduces a five-layer stratified architecture with a unique polyadic feedback topology enabling bidirectional drift correction and resource orchestration. Three interpretive conceptual formulas are advanced to model risk propagation, decision confidence, and governance load, furnishing system designers with abstract yet operationalizable constructs.MPSIM is positioned as a blueprint for next-generation, outbreak-aware healthcare systems that embed surveillance intelligence directly into clinical workflows while satisfying stringent governance and interoperability requirements. The architecture prioritizes theoretical scalability, ethical oversight, and seamless multi-source fusion to advance proactive containment strategies across diverse deployment environments.
The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into hospital decision ecosystems represents a transformative shift towards autonomous clinical workflows, enabling enhanced decision-making, resource optimization, and patient outcomes. This conceptual manuscript proposes a novel architecture, the Hospital Autonomous Workflow Intelligence System (HAWIS), designed to orchestrate AI-driven intelligence across clinical pipelines, electronic health records (EHRs), and governance frameworks. HAWIS incorporates layered components for data interoperability, real-time analytics, and adaptive monitoring, ensuring seamless integration within hospital environments. Drawing on recent advancements in clinical AI architectures, healthcare analytics infrastructures, and decision support systems, the architecture addresses key challenges, including interoperability barriers, governance complexities, and workflow disruptions. Theoretical formulas are introduced to model decision confidence propagation and governance load dynamics, providing interpretive tools for assessing system resilience. The framework emphasizes autonomous orchestration, where AI agents facilitate proactive interventions in hospital decision ecosystems, mitigating risks associated with data silos and regulatory compliance. By synthesizing the literature, this work highlights the need for a scalable, secure infrastructure to support AI deployment in healthcare. Ultimately, HAWIS offers a blueprint for future hospital systems, fostering intelligence-driven ecosystems that enhance clinical efficiency without empirical validation or performance metrics. This conceptual approach underscores AI’s potential to redefine hospital workflows, promoting equitable and safe decision-making.
The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare demands innovative architectures that prioritize real-time decision-making in dynamic clinical settings. This conceptual manuscript introduces the edge-deployed hospital adaptive response topology (EHART), a novel intelligence loop designed for seamless integration into hospital ecosystems. EHART leverages edge computing to process multimodal clinical data locally, minimizing latency while ensuring interoperability with electronic health records (EHRs) and decision support systems. By orchestrating a closed-loop feedback mechanism, the framework addresses governance challenges, including AI drift monitoring, ethical data exchange, and resource-efficient analytics. Theoretical analysis highlights how EHART enhances clinical workflow resilience through adaptive intelligence cycles, reducing monitoring burdens and propagating decision confidence across interconnected nodes. Key components include layered data ingestion, real-time inference engines, and governance overlays that align with interoperability standards. Without relying on empirical evaluations, this work synthesizes recent literature on clinical AI infrastructures to propose a scalable model for smart hospitals. Implications include fostering trustworthy AI deployments in resource-constrained environments, emphasizing theoretical frameworks for risk assessment and system dynamics. Ultimately, EHART represents a paradigm for future-proofing hospital intelligence in real-time clinical contexts, balancing innovation with regulatory compliance.
The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into healthcare systems marks a fundamental shift from isolated predictive analytics tools to embedded, scalable architectures that support autonomous governance. This narrative review synthesizes 28 peer-reviewed publications from leading journals to examine AI’s role across healthcare infrastructure and clinical analytics. Early work established deep learning foundations for risk prediction, diagnostic support, and prognostic modelling using multimodal data. These capabilities rapidly evolved into system-level applications that enhance data ingestion, real-time inference, and operational optimisation across entire care ecosystems.By the early 2020s, attention turned to deployment realities, including clinician acceptance, cost-effectiveness, and integration into existing workflows. Frameworks for responsible implementation emerged alongside regulatory perspectives that emphasise safety, equity, and continuous oversight. Recent contributions highlight the transition toward closed-loop systems in which predictive outputs inform decisions, trigger interventions, and feed outcome data back for model recalibration. Governance architectures now address ethical challenges, explainability gaps, and the move from generalist to specialised medical AI.This review organises the literature through an original systems-level lens spanning four interconnected pillars—data foundations, analytic intelligence, deployment mechanisms, and governance layers—rather than replicating prior application-specific taxonomies. Cross-study analysis reveals consistent patterns: predictive analytics serve as the foundational engine, clinical decision support acts as the execution layer, closed-loop feedback enables adaptation, and governance ensures sustainable autonomy. The synthesis demonstrates that AI is no longer an adjunct technology but a core infrastructural element reshaping how healthcare systems ingest, process, act upon, and learn from data at scale.Trajectory as a coherent progression toward autonomous yet human-centred governance, the review provides clinicians, system architects, and policymakers with a unified understanding of current capabilities and the infrastructural requirements for responsible scaling.
Foundation models, characterized by their large-scale pretraining on diverse datasets, represent a transformative paradigm in artificial intelligence (AI) applications for healthcare systems and analytics. These models, often based on transformer architectures, enable generalist capabilities that extend beyond narrow task-specific AI, facilitating integration into complex healthcare infrastructures. This review synthesizes recent literature on the architectural integration of foundation models into healthcare systems, emphasizing their role in enhancing clinical analytics, decision support, and operational efficiency while addressing critical oversight considerations, including ethical, regulatory, and safety frameworks.In healthcare systems, foundation models are increasingly deployed to process multimodal data streams, including electronic health records (EHRs), medical imaging, and real-time patient monitoring. Architectural integration involves embedding these models within hospital information systems, enabling seamless data ingestion, inference, and feedback loops. For instance, models like those adapted from large language models (LLMs) support natural language processing for EHR mining, predictive analytics for disease progression, and generative tasks for synthetic data augmentation. Oversight considerations are paramount, encompassing regulatory compliance, bias mitigation, and human-AI collaboration protocols to ensure patient safety and equity.The synthesis highlights key architectural patterns: federated learning for privacy-preserving model training, hybrid human-AI workflows for clinical decision-making, and adaptive systems for continuous model recalibration. Analytics applications span precision medicine, where foundation models integrate genomic and clinical data for personalized interventions, to population health management, optimizing resource allocation through predictive modeling. Ethical oversight includes checklists for AI deployment in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), emphasizing equitable access and cultural adaptability.Challenges in integration include data interoperability, model interpretability, and scalability in resource-constrained settings. Regulatory imperatives call for validation frameworks and safety standards to govern the rollout of generative AI. This review provides an original systems-level framing, structuring the discourse around data-to-decision pipelines, governance overlays, and evaluative metrics for sustainable adoption.Ultimately, foundation models hold promise for closed-loop healthcare systems, where AI-driven insights inform interventions and feedback refines models iteratively. However, rigorous oversight is essential to balance innovation with accountability, ensuring these technologies augment rather than disrupt clinical workflows. By synthesizing high-impact publications, this narrative review offers integrative insights for researchers, clinicians, and policymakers navigating AI-enabled healthcare transformation.
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a major global health crisis, particularly due to multidrug-resistant gram-negative bacteria that are difficult to treat because of their impermeable outer membrane and strong efflux mechanisms, making antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) a promising alternative owing to their broad-spectrum activity and rapid bactericidal effects, although their clinical translation is limited by instability, production costs, and toxicity to human cells; meanwhile, traditional experimental discovery of AMPs is slow and expensive, and existing computational methods often optimize only antimicrobial activity while neglecting toxicity or diversity, leading to unsafe or narrow solutions, while reinforcement learning approaches may suffer from mode collapse and limited exploration of sequence space; to address these limitations, this work proposes a generative flow networks (GFlowNets)-based framework for multi-objective AMP design against gram-negative pathogens, in which a sequence generator constructs peptides stepwise and is guided by a reward function that integrates predicted antimicrobial activity and human cell toxicity from separate machine learning models, enabling simultaneous optimization of efficacy and safety; unlike conventional generative models, GFlowNets sample sequences proportional to reward, promoting diverse outputs that span the Pareto frontier of activity-toxicity trade-offs, while also allowing conditioning on desired properties and modular improvement of predictive components over time; overall, this framework provides a principled and scalable approach to antimicrobial peptide discovery that balances potency, safety, and diversity, potentially accelerating the identification of therapeutic candidates for combating antimicrobial resistance.
Postpartum hemorrhage (PPH) is the leading cause of maternal mortality worldwide, accounting for 25–30% of deaths, particularly in low-resource settings, and early identification of high-risk patients during labor could enable timely interventions such as uterotonic administration, blood preparation, and escalation of care; however, current risk stratification models rely mainly on static antepartum factors and fail to incorporate dynamic intrapartum physiological changes. Existing tools, including those from the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative, use baseline maternal characteristics such as prior PPH, BMI, parity, and comorbidities, but do not capture continuously evolving labor data, despite intrapartum signals like fetal heart rate patterns, maternal vital sign trends, and labor progression metrics containing rich predictive information that remains underused in real-time decision-making, while clinical judgment is limited by inter-observer variability and inability to integrate complex temporal trends. To address this gap, we propose an explainable gradient boosting machine framework for real-time PPH risk prediction that integrates electronic fetal monitoring parameters (baseline rate, variability, decelerations), maternal vital signs (heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, oxygen saturation), and labor progression features (cervical dilation, contraction frequency, stage duration, and oxytocin use), producing continuously updated risk scores throughout labor. The system combines a gradient boosting model (XGBoost or LightGBM), a SHAP-based explainability module, a real-time feature extraction pipeline, and a clinician-facing dashboard that displays risk scores and key contributing factors, where SHAP provides both global and patient-specific interpretability by identifying how features such as tachysystole or prolonged labor stages influence predictions, thereby improving transparency and clinical trust. Overall, this framework enables dynamic, interpretable PPH risk assessment using routinely collected intrapartum data, combining predictive accuracy with explainability to support earlier detection of hemorrhage risk and more timely, targeted interventions.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, machine learning models developed in high-resource hospitals achieved strong performance in predicting outcomes such as mortality, ICU admission, and mechanical ventilation, but their accuracy often degrades when applied to low-resource settings due to differences in patient populations, disease severity, clinical practices, and documentation quality. Low-resource hospitals also face limited patient volumes, incomplete labeled data, and strict privacy regulations (e.g., HIPAA and GDPR), which prevent centralized data sharing and hinder independent model development, creating a barrier to equitable AI deployment. To address this, we propose a federated transfer learning framework that adapts prognostic models from high-resource to low-resource hospitals without exchanging patient-level data. The approach transfers only aggregate statistics (e.g., feature means, variances, class-conditional distributions, and correlations) via a secure lightweight protocol, enabling target hospitals to align feature distributions using domain adaptation techniques and fine-tune models on small local datasets. The framework includes source model training, statistical aggregation, secure transmission, and target-side adaptation modules, ensuring no raw patient data leaves any institution. By relying on aggregate statistics, the method preserves privacy while mitigating domain shift and maintaining clinical utility across diverse healthcare environments. This scalable and privacy-preserving framework supports broader deployment of COVID-19 predictive models and provides a generalizable strategy for other medical conditions with heterogeneous healthcare settings.
Surgical site infections (SSIs) remain a significant source of postoperative morbidity despite established guidelines for perioperative antibiotic prophylaxis. Current protocols emphasize fixed preoperative timing and interval-based intraoperative redosing, yet fail to account for patient heterogeneity, pharmacokinetic variability, and uncertainty in procedure duration. This study proposes a hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) framework for personalized optimization of antibiotic prophylaxis across the perioperative timeline. The framework decomposes decision-making into two coordinated levels: a high-level policy that determines optimal preoperative antibiotic timing based on predicted procedure duration and patient-specific infection risk, and a low-level policy that adaptively manages intraoperative redosing using real-time updates on elapsed time, remaining duration, and cumulative drug exposure. Procedure duration is estimated using machine learning models that provide both point predictions and uncertainty intervals, enabling risk-sensitive decision-making. The problem is formalized as a Markov decision process with a reward structure balancing SSI prevention against antibiotic stewardship, incorporating penalties for unnecessary dosing and suboptimal timing. Off-policy evaluation using historical surgical data is proposed to assess performance relative to guideline-based and clinician-driven strategies. By integrating predictive modeling with multi-timescale decision optimization, the framework aims to reduce SSI incidence while minimizing antibiotic overuse. This approach highlights the potential of reinforcement learning to advance precision perioperative care and improve clinical outcomes through adaptive, data-driven prophylaxis strategies.
Intensive care unit (ICU) data consist of high-frequency multivariate time series, including vital signs, laboratory results, and hemodynamic variables, which are crucial for clinical decision-making and predictive modeling. However, these data are frequently incomplete due to monitor interruptions, clinical workflows, and selective measurement, with missing rates ranging from 20% to over 80% depending on the variable. Missingness in ICU time series is often not random, as sicker patients tend to be monitored more frequently, creating a missing not at random (MNAR) mechanism. Conventional imputation methods such as mean filling, interpolation, and multiple imputation assume random missingness and therefore introduce bias and distort clinical signals under MNAR conditions. We propose a variational recurrent neural network (VRNN) with stochastic attention to impute ICU time series under MNAR settings. The framework integrates latent state modeling of physiological dynamics, stochastic attention over observed measurements using Gumbel-Softmax sampling, and a missingness pattern encoder that explicitly models the observation process. An imputation decoder generates probabilistic estimates of missing values conditioned on latent states, attention context, and missingness structure. This framework enables uncertainty-aware and potentially unbiased imputation in ICU time series by jointly modeling physiological dynamics and missingness mechanisms. It combines variational inference and stochastic attention to address systematic bias in conventional approaches, with future work needed to validate performance on real-world ICU datasets.
Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly advanced since the transformer architecture was introduced in 2017, with systems such as GPT-3, GPT-4, Med-PaLM, and Claude increasingly explored for applications in medical education, clinical documentation, decision support, and patient communication, raising both optimism and concerns regarding safety and reliability. This systematic review synthesizes evidence across studies retrieved from PubMed, arXiv, ACL Anthology, IEEE Xplore, and Google Scholar that empirically evaluated LLMs in clinical settings using quantitative performance metrics, with risk of bias assessed using an adapted PROBAST framework for machine learning research. Findings show that LLMs achieve 60–90% accuracy on USMLE-style examinations, with leading models such as GPT-4 and Med-PaLM 2 reaching or surpassing passing thresholds, while in clinical documentation tasks they can reduce physician workload by approximately 30–50% in generating outputs such as discharge summaries, though human review remains consistently required. Performance in clinical decision support is more variable and specialty-dependent, and hallucination rates ranging from 5–30% have been reported, alongside persistent issues of bias and overconfidence in incorrect outputs. Overall, while LLMs demonstrate strong capabilities in structured medical knowledge tasks and documentation support, current limitations including hallucinations, bias, and lack of prospective clinical validation prevent safe autonomous deployment, making clinician oversight and robust safety safeguards essential for any clinical use.
Oncology drug development is an expensive and high-failure process, with costs exceeding two billion dollars per approved drug and success rates below 10%. Deep learning has recently been explored as a strategy to improve efficiency across the drug discovery pipeline. This systematic review evaluates its application in target identification, compound screening and de novo drug design, and clinical trial optimization. Following PRISMA 2020 guidelines, multiple databases were searched and studies were screened using predefined inclusion criteria, with risk of bias assessed via established tools. The literature shows that graph neural networks and transformer-based models are the most widely used architectures, particularly in early-stage discovery tasks. Although many studies report strong in silico performance, often with AUC values above 0.80, only a small proportion demonstrate experimental or clinical validation. Overall, deep learning significantly advances computational drug discovery in oncology, but translation into clinically validated therapies remains limited, especially in trial optimization, highlighting the need for stronger prospective and experimental validation frameworks.
Sepsis continues to be a major contributor to morbidity and mortality among hospitalized patients globally, especially within intensive care and emergency departments, where rapid recognition is essential for improving survival through timely treatment. In recent years, machine learning approaches have gained attention for their ability to predict sepsis onset using routinely collected electronic health record data. This systematic review, conducted in accordance with PRISMA 2020 guidelines, synthesizes evidence from studies published between 2017 and 2025, focusing on model architectures, feature selection and engineering strategies, prediction time horizons, and validation methodologies. Searches across major biomedical and informatics databases identified 67 eligible studies. The included literature shows that logistic regression, ensemble tree-based algorithms, and deep learning models are most frequently applied for sepsis prediction tasks. However, the majority of studies rely on retrospective datasets with internal validation, while only a limited number incorporate prospective or real-world validation frameworks. Overall, although reported model performance is often strong in retrospective analyses, a consistent decline in accuracy is observed when models are evaluated in real clinical environments. These findings highlight that prospective validation and improved generalizability are still underdeveloped areas, underscoring the need for future research to emphasize real-time deployment and robust external validation before clinical integration.
Synthetic electronic health record (EHR) data generation has emerged as a potential solution to balancing clinical data accessibility with patient privacy, using generative artificial intelligence to simulate tabular, longitudinal, and textual health records without exposing identifiable patient information. This critical review, informed by PRISMA-ScR methodology, examines studies published between 2017 and 2025 focusing on generative models for synthetic EHR creation, with particular attention to privacy risks, data fidelity, downstream task utility, and ethical or regulatory considerations. A total of 67 studies were included after systematic screening, showing a dominance of GAN-based approaches alongside growing use of diffusion models and large language models in recent years, although privacy assessment and benchmarking practices remain inconsistent. Overall, the evidence suggests that while synthetic EHR data can facilitate data sharing, research, and model development, achieving a balance between realism, utility, and privacy remains challenging, as high statistical fidelity does not necessarily translate into clinical usefulness and strong downstream performance does not ensure adequate privacy protection.
Sleep disorders, including obstructive sleep apnea, insomnia, restless legs syndrome, narcolepsy, and central sleep apnea, represent a major public health burden. Polysomnography is the diagnostic gold standard but is resource-intensive, leading to increasing use of home sleep apnea testing and wearable devices to improve accessibility. This systematic review evaluates deep learning models in sleep medicine across polysomnography, home sleep apnea testing, and wearable data, focusing on architectures, signal types, validation approaches, diagnostic tasks, and clinical readiness. A PRISMA 2020–compliant search was conducted in PubMed, IEEE Xplore, Scopus, and Web of Science for studies published from 2017 to 2025, including those applying deep learning for sleep staging, apnea/hypopnea detection, or sleep disorder diagnosis using PSG, HSAT, or wearable-derived signals. Twenty-nine studies were included. Convolutional neural networks were the most widely used architecture, often combined with recurrent or hybrid models for temporal dependencies, while transformer-based models have recently emerged for long-sequence sleep analysis. Deep learning methods demonstrate strong performance in sleep staging and respiratory event detection, especially using polysomnography data. However, limited external validation, heterogeneous datasets, and a lack of prospective clinical deployment remain major barriers to clinical translation.
Rare diseases are challenging for AI development due to sparse patient populations, fragmented expertise, and strong inter-site variability, making federated learning a promising privacy-preserving solution for multi-institutional model training. This systematic review evaluates federated learning approaches for rare disease diagnosis and related data-scarce clinical settings, with emphasis on handling extreme data scarcity, class imbalance, heterogeneity, and privacy constraints. A PRISMA 2020-compliant search of PubMed, IEEE Xplore, Scopus, Web of Science, and arXiv (2017–2025) identified 2,015 records, with 56 studies included after screening. The most commonly used strategies included FedProx-based optimization, personalized federated learning, class-aware aggregation, generative data augmentation, and domain adaptation techniques. Overall, standard federated averaging is often insufficient under severe scarcity and distribution shift, while hybrid approaches combining personalization, augmentation, and domain adaptation show greater promise for improving performance in rare disease applications.
Public health emergencies reveal critical weaknesses in healthcare supply chains, especially when PPE demand outpaces procurement and distribution capacity, making predictive analytics an important tool for forecasting demand and improving allocation during crises. This systematic review evaluates predictive analytics models for PPE demand forecasting and distribution optimization during public health emergencies, focusing on model types, data sources, validation approaches, performance metrics, equity considerations, and implementation readiness. Following PRISMA 2020 guidelines, searches were conducted in PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, IEEE Xplore, and Google Scholar for studies published between 2017 and 2025, yielding 2,847 records, of which 35 met inclusion criteria. Included studies comprised time series and statistical models (34%), machine learning and hybrid approaches (29%), optimization methods (26%), and simulation or digital twin frameworks (11%), with limited evidence of real-world deployment. Overall, findings indicate that predictive analytics can enhance PPE supply chain resilience by improving demand forecasting, allocation decisions, and scenario testing, but widespread adoption is limited by poor data interoperability, insufficient prospective validation, weak equity integration, and limited operational integration into healthcare decision systems.
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a leading cause of death, with exacerbations worsening functional decline, reducing quality of life, and increasing healthcare use. Current management remains reactive, with treatment often initiated only after symptoms worsen. Existing monitoring approaches struggle to distinguish between clinically significant deterioration and normal variability, leading to delayed intervention. This article proposes a digital twin framework combining patient-specific respiratory models with real-time wearable data to predict and manage COPD exacerbations proactively. The framework includes a mechanistic lung model, continuous data ingestion, a data assimilation module, an exacerbation prediction layer, and an alert system, enabling early detection of physiological deviations before severe symptoms arise. By supporting pre-emptive telehealth, medication adjustments, and patient self-management with clinician oversight, this approach could shift COPD care from reactive to personalized, proactive management, pending robust modeling, reliable sensing, and real-world validation.
This article proposes a conceptual framework for a diagnostic support system in emergency departments that leverages large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, and chain-of-thought reasoning. By combining triage notes and vital signs, the system generates a ranked differential diagnosis list to assist clinicians without replacing their judgment. The framework includes components like a triage note encoder, a vital sign encoder, a retrieval module, and a diagnosis ranker, using evidence from clinical guidelines, curated references, and de-identified prior cases. The approach grounds the model in authoritative knowledge while ensuring transparency and explainability in the diagnostic process. However, prospective validation, integration into workflows, and clinician oversight are crucial before implementation to ensure safety and effectiveness.
Detecting rare diseases often requires data from multiple institutions due to the scarcity of cases at individual hospitals. Centralizing data is not feasible due to privacy, consent, and jurisdictional issues. Federated learning enables model training across hospitals without transferring raw data, but it lacks formal privacy guarantees. Model updates can still leak information, and aggregation servers may compromise privacy if they handle unprotected data. This article presents a conceptual framework combining federated learning, differential privacy, and secure multi-party computation for rare disease detection across 50+ international hospitals. The system addresses data scarcity, regulatory fragmentation, and network heterogeneity. Each hospital trains a local model, applies differential privacy to updates, and shares encrypted updates via an aggregation protocol. Non-colluding servers compute global updates without accessing plaintext data. Differential privacy reduces the impact of individual patient data, while secure multi-party computation ensures privacy at the aggregation layer. These methods enable a privacy-preserving approach to federated learning for rare disease collaboration. The proposed framework enables multi-continental rare disease detection without centralizing patient data, offering a privacy-preserving model for future consortia.
Chest X-ray is a commonly used imaging tool in both acute and routine care, but the increasing reporting workload highlights the need for structured preliminary reports that aid triage, reduce delays, and ensure clinical relevance. Current AI systems often focus on classification or generic report generation, neglecting critical factors like free-text radiology requests, clinical history, and comparison context, leading to reports that, while technically fluent, are insufficiently focused. This article proposes a multimodal vision-language model that interprets both chest X-ray images and free-text radiology requests to generate structured preliminary reports directly addressing the clinical question. The model combines a radiographic encoder based on vision transformers, a text encoder for requests and prior reports, a cross-modal attention module, and a structured report decoder, organizing the output into relevant sections such as indication, technique, findings, impression, comparison, and answer-to-request. By aligning report generation with the clinical request, the model ensures that it answers specific questions—such as concerns about pneumonia, pulmonary oedema, or pneumothorax—improving report relevance, reducing misinterpretation, and supporting safer human-in-the-loop review. However, its effectiveness relies on accurate alignment, factual consistency, uncertainty management, and validation in real-world radiology settings.
Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) is used to support patients with severe cardiac or respiratory failure, requiring constant manual adjustments of pump flow, sweep gas flow, and oxygen fraction. However, current ECMO management lacks a real-time optimization system tailored to individual patient needs. This manuscript proposes an offline reinforcement learning framework for dynamic ECMO optimization, utilizing real-time measurements of blood gases, hemodynamics, and pump flow. The framework includes a state encoder for various patient data, an action space for adjustments to ECMO settings, and a reward function that balances oxygenation, hemodynamic support, and complication avoidance. A safety shield filters unsafe recommendations before clinician review. The system aims to provide personalized, proactive, and safety-constrained ECMO management, with the goal of guiding future research validation rather than claiming experimental results.
Emergency department chief complaints and triage notes are early indicators of health changes during infectious disease outbreaks. These records, made before confirmatory testing, provide a presyndromic view of population health. Traditional syndromic surveillance relies on predefined syndrome categories, which may not align with novel pathogens. Early outbreaks often present as sparse, ambiguous symptom clusters, resulting in few labeled examples for automated detection. This framework suggests using contrastive learning with prototypical networks for few-shot detection of emerging infectious disease syndromes from free-text notes. It leverages historical data to create a robust clinical text embedding space, with a small set of labeled examples defining new syndromes. The system includes a contrastive pre-training encoder, prototypical network, and few-shot classifier. The encoder learns from unlabelled historical notes, and the prototypical network creates syndrome prototypes from a few labeled examples. This framework is designed for situations where public health officials observe early suspect cases but lack mature labeled datasets. It can identify early clusters by comparing incoming notes to emerging syndrome prototypes. Contrastive learning with prototypical networks enables proactive presyndromic surveillance, allowing rapid adaptation during the early phase of an outbreak without relying on large labeled datasets.
Pressure ulcers are a persistent issue in bedridden patients, especially in intensive care, rehabilitation, and long-term care, leading to pain, infection, and extended hospital stays. Current risk assessments rely on intermittent scoring and clinical judgment, failing to account for continuous changes in body posture, tissue loading, and mechanical tolerance. This conceptual framework proposes a physics-informed graph neural network to predict pressure ulcer risk by integrating data from body position sensors, local tissue loading, and skin perfusion measurements into a dynamic, personalized model. The model represents the body as a graph, with nodes representing pressure-prone areas and edges indicating anatomical and mechanical connections. Tissue stress, perfusion data, and posture features are processed through network layers constrained by soft-tissue mechanics. By encoding the relationship between external forces, internal tissue deformation, ischemia, and damage, the framework allows risk propagation across adjacent anatomical regions. This approach offers a path for continuous, personalized pressure ulcer risk monitoring, laying the foundation for clinical validation and sensor integration.
Rare pediatric tumors like sarcomas, neuroblastoma, medulloblastoma, and retinoblastoma pose a challenge for developing deep learning models due to the limited availability of histopathology images, which are distributed across multiple institutions. This scarcity is compounded by privacy concerns, as whole-slide images often contain sensitive clinical and genomic data, and generative adversarial networks (GANs) risk memorizing and leaking training samples. To address this, a differentially private GAN framework is proposed for synthesizing high-resolution histopathology patches of rare pediatric cancers. The framework incorporates a generator for image synthesis, a discriminator for realism assessment, per-sample gradient clipping, Gaussian noise injection, and a privacy accountant, ensuring provable privacy guarantees during the training process. The synthetic images generated can aid in data augmentation, model pre-training, and benchmarking without exposing identifiable pathology data, offering a privacy-preserving solution for dataset augmentation while emphasizing the importance of clinical validation.
Anticoagulation management requires balancing multiple factors such as bleeding risk, thromboembolic risk, drug interactions, and renal function. Deep learning can assist in risk prediction, but its effectiveness relies on clinicians' ability to understand and verify the recommendations. Black-box models may recommend actions without providing clear explanations. In contrast, clinical guidelines are rule-based but not directly executable by neural models. This article introduces a neuro-symbolic XAI framework that combines deep learning predictions with explicit clinical guidelines. It includes a neural prediction module, a symbolic reasoning engine, and an integration layer for traceable justifications. The neuro-symbolic approach connects data-driven predictions to clinical rules, improving auditability and trustworthiness in decision support. This framework aims to enhance anticoagulation management by providing verifiable, clinician-understandable decision support, focusing on explainability-by-design.
Fall risk in aging populations is a modifiable health concern, with mobility patterns changing over time due to factors like frailty, comorbidities, and medication. Smartwatch accelerometers provide a privacy-sensitive way to monitor gait and movement outside clinical settings. However, federated learning, which supports privacy by keeping sensor data local, faces challenges in aging populations due to concept drift from gradual mobility decline, which can invalidate static models. This article proposes a federated continual learning framework to adaptively maintain fall risk prediction models using smartwatch data. The system includes local models that combine feature extraction with temporal sequence modeling, continual learning to prevent forgetting, and a federated server for privacy-preserving coordination. It aims to support personalized fall risk monitoring, reduce concept drift, and enable scalable deployment in senior care settings, with clinical validation necessary for real-world assessment.