How to identify the next dangerous virus before it spreads among people is the central question in a new Comment in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. In it, researchers discuss how artificial intelligence (AI), combined with the One Health approach, can contribute to improved prediction and surveillance.

"Artificial intelligence cannot by itself prevent pandemics, but the technology can be a powerful supplement to the knowledge and methods we already use.

In the world around us, many things exist in the context of time: a bird’s path through the sky is understood as different positions over a period of time, and conversations as a series of words occurring one after another.

Computer scientists and statisticians call these sequences time series. Although statisticians have found ways to understand these patterns and make predictions about the future, modern deep learning AI models struggle to perform just as well, if not worse, than statistical models.

Adiposity - or the accumulation of excess fat in the body - is a known driver of cardiometabolic diseases such as heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and kidney disease. But getting the full picture of a person’s risk is harder than it may seem. Traditional measures such as body mass index (BMI) are imperfect, conflating fat and muscle mass and not capturing where in the body fat is located.

A Harvard Medical School–led research team has developed an AI tool that can reliably tell apart two look-alike cancers found in the brain but with different origins, behaviors, and treatments.

The tool, called PICTURE (Pathology Image Characterization Tool with Uncertainty-aware Rapid Evaluations), distinguished with near-perfect accuracy between glioblastoma - the most common and aggressive brain tumor - and primary central nervous system lymphoma (PCNSL), a rarer cancer often mistaken for glioblastoma.

As a wound heals, it goes through several stages: clotting to stop bleeding, immune system response, scabbing, and scarring.

A wearable device called "a-Heal," designed by engineers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, aims to optimize each stage of the process. The system uses a tiny camera and AI to detect the stage of healing and deliver a treatment in the form of medication or an electric field.

One of the first randomized controlled trials assessing the effectiveness of a large language model (LLM) chatbot 'Amanda' for relationship support shows that a single session of chatbot therapy can be as beneficial as a evidence-based journaling in assisting with relationship conflict resolution, according to a study published in the open-access journal PLOS Mental Health

Mayo Clinic researchers have developed artificial intelligence (AI) tools that help identify which children with asthma face the highest risk of serious asthma exacerbation and acute respiratory infections. The study, published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, found the tools can detect those risks as early as age 3.