The escalating costs of health care and other recent trends have made health care decisions of great societal import, with decision-making responsibility often being transferred from practitioners to health economists, health plans, and insurers. Health care decision making increasingly is guided by evidence that a treatment is efficacious, effective-disseminable, cost-effective, and scientifically plausible. Under these conditions of heightened cost concerns and institutional-economic decision making, psychologists are losing the opportunity to play a leadership role in mental and behavioral health care: Other types of practitioners are providing an increasing proportion of delivered treatment, and the use of psychiatric medication has increased dramatically relative to the provision of psychological interventions. Research has shown that numerous psychological interventions are efficacious, effective, and cost-effective. However, these interventions are used infrequently with patients who would benefit from them, in part because clinical psychologists have not made a convincing case for the use of these interventions (e.g., by supplying the data that decision makers need to support implementation of such interventions) and because clinical psychologists do not themselves use these interventions even when given the opportunity to do so. Clinical psychologists' failure to achieve a more significant impact on clinical and public health may be traced to their deep ambivalence about the role of science and their lack of adequate science training, which leads them to value personal clinical experience over research evidence, use assessment practices that have dubious psychometric support, and not use the interventions for which there is the strongest evidence of efficacy. Clinical psychology resembles medicine at a point in its history when practitioners were operating in a largely prescientific manner. Prior to the scientific reform of medicine in the early 1900s, physicians typically shared the attitudes of many of today's clinical psychologists, such as valuing personal experience over scientific research. Medicine was reformed, in large part, by a principled effort by the American Medical Association to increase the science base of medical school education. Substantial evidence shows that many clinical psychology doctoral training programs, especially PsyD and for-profit programs, do not uphold high standards for graduate admission, have high student-faculty ratios, deemphasize science in their training, and produce students who fail to apply or generate scientific knowledge. A promising strategy for improving the quality and clinical and public health impact of clinical psychology is through a new accreditation system that demands high-quality science training as a central feature of doctoral training in clinical psychology. Just as strengthening training standards in medicine markedly enhanced the quality of health care, improved training standards in clinical psychology will enhance health and mental health care. Such a system will (a) allow the public and employers to identify scientifically trained psychologists; (b) stigmatize ascientific training programs and practitioners; (c) produce aspirational effects, thereby enhancing training quality generally; and (d) help accredited programs improve their training in the application and generation of science. These effects should enhance the generation, application, and dissemination of experimentally supported interventions, thereby improving clinical and public health. Experimentally based treatments not only are highly effective but also are cost-effective relative to other interventions; therefore, they could help control spiraling health care costs. The new Psychological Clinical Science Accreditation System (PCSAS) is intended to accredit clinical psychology training programs that offer high-quality science-centered education and training, producing graduates who are successful in generating and applying scientific knowledge. Psychologists, universities, and other stakeholders should vigorously support this new accreditation system as the surest route to a scientifically principled clinical psychology that can powerfully benefit clinical and public health.
Clinical psychology students frequently report feeling underprepared for the interpersonal demands of therapeutic work, highlighting the need for accessible opportunities to practise core counselling skills before seeing real clients. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) now enable simulated interaction partners that may support early skills development. This study examined postgraduate clinical psychology students' perceptions of two AI-based simulations: a text-based chatbot (ChatGPT) and a voice-based avatar (HeyGen). Twenty-four students completed two brief cognitive-behavioural role-plays (counterbalanced), one with each tool, and provided both quantitative ratings and qualitative feedback on perceived usefulness, skill application, responsiveness and engagement, and perceived skill improvement. Both AI tools were evaluated positively across dimensions. However, the avatar was rated significantly higher than the chatbot for perceived usefulness, skill application, and perceived skill improvement, and qualitative comments highlighted the added value of voice-based interaction for conveying social and emotional cues. These findings suggest that AI-driven simulation may suppl
The third edition of the hugely successful Handbook of Child and Adolescent Clinical Psychology incorporates important advances in the field to provide a reliable and accessible resource for clinical psychologists. Beginning with a set of general conceptual frameworks for practice, the book gives specific guidance on the management of problems commonly encountered in clinical work with children and adolescents drawing on the best practice in the fields of clinical psychology and family therapy. In six sections thorough and comprehensive coverage of the following areas is provided: Frameworks for practice Problems of infancy and early childhood Problems of middle childhood Problems of adolescence Child abuse Adjustment to major life transitions Thoroughly updated throughout, each chapter dealing with specific clinical problems includes cases examples and detailed discussion of diagnosis, classification, epidemiology and clinical features. New material includes the latest advances in: child and adolescent clinical psychology; developmental psychology and developmental psychopathology; assessment and treatment programmes. This book is invaluable as both a reference work for experienced practitioners and as an up-to-date, evidence-based practice manual for clinical psychologists in training. The Handbook of Child and Adolescent Clinical Psychology is one of a set of 3 books published by Routledge which includes The Handbook of Adult Clinical Psychology: An Evidence Based Practice Approach, Second Edition (Edited by Carr & McNulty) and The Handbook of Intellectual Disability and Clinical Psychology Practice (Edited by Alan Carr, Christine Linehan, Gary O'Reilly, Patricia Noonan Walsh and John McEvoy).
Part 1. Introduction. J.E. Maddux, Social Psychological Foundations of Clinical Psychology: History and Orienting Principles. Part 2. Psychological Health and Psychological Problems. Self and Identity. M.R. Leary, E.B. Tate, The Role of Self-awareness and Self-evaluation in Dysfunctional Patterns of Thought, Emotion, and Behavior. D.P. McAdams, J.M. Adler, Autobiographical Memory and the Construction of a Narrative Identity: Theory, Research, and Clinical Implications. P.W. Corrigan, J.E. Larson, S.A. Kuwabara, Social Psychology of the Stigma of Mental Illness: Public and Self-stigma Models. Self-regulation. C.E. Doerr, R.F. Baumeister, Self-regulatory Strength and Psychological Adjustment: Implications of the Limited Resource Model of Self-regulation. T.J. Strauman, M.C. McCrudden, N.P. Jones, Self-regulation and Psychopathology: Toward an Integrative Perspective. G. Oettingen, P.M. Gollwitzer, Strategies of Setting and Implementing Goals: Mental Contrasting and Implementation Intentions. C.S. Dweck, E.S. Elliott-Moskwa, Self-theories: The Roots of Defensiveness. Interpersonal Processes. H.S. Shorey, Attachment Theory as a Social Developmental Psychopathology Framework for the Practice of Psychotherapy. B. Lakey, Social Support: Basic Research and New Strategies for Intervention. P. Dijkstra, F.X. Gibbons, A.P. Buunk, Social Comparison Theory. D.M. Sloan, Self-disclosure and Psychological Well-being. Social Cognition and Emotion. S. Lyubomirsky, R. Dickerhoof, A Construal Approach to Increasing Happiness. J. Price Tangney, P. Salovey, Emotions of the Imperiled Ego: Shame, Guilt, Jealousy, and Envy. J. Riskind, L.B. Alloy, B.M. Iacoviello, Social Cognitive Vulnerability to Depression and Anxiety. Part 3. Social Psychology of Psychological Assessment and Diagnosis. H.N. Garb, The Social Psychology of Clinical Judgment. S. Eap, R. Grimes, J. Ng, G.C. Nagayama Hall, Sociocultural Issues in the Diagnosis and Assessment of Psychological Disorders. W.G. Shadel, Clinical Assessment of Personality: Perspectives from Contemporary Personality Science. L. Smith Benjamin, Interpersonal Assessment and Treatment of Personality Disorders. Social Psychology of Behavior Change and Clinical Interactions. E. Kross, W. Mischel, Y. Shoda, Enabling Self-control: A Cognitive-affective Processing Systems Approach to Problematic Behavior. R.L. Dearing, C. Twaragowski, The Social Psychology of Help Seeking. J.E. Maddux, Social Cognitive Theories and Clinical Interventions: Basic Principles and Guidelines. J.O. Prochaska, J.M. Prochaska, Self-directed Change: A Transtheoretical Model. P.B. Perrin, M. Heesacker, C. Pendley, M.B. Smith, Social Influence Processes and Persuasion in Psychotherapy and Counseling. J. Weinberger, C. Siefert, G. Haggerty, Implicit Processes in Social and Clinical Psychology. R. Miranda, S.M. Andersen, The Social Psychology of Transference. D.R. Forsyth, Group Processes and Group Psychotherapy: Social Psychological Foundations of Change in Therapeutic Groups. Part 5. Current Status and Future Directions. J. Price Tangney, Social Psychological Foundations of Clinical Psychology: Initial Trends, Current Status and Future Directions.
GENERAL ISSUES IN CLINICAL RESEARCH Overview of Research Design Issues in Clinical Psychology - A. Kazdin Ethical Perspectives in Clinical Research - D. Bersoff & D. Bersoff Ethnicity, Gender, and Cross-Cultural Issues in Clinical Research - S. Sue, et al. Statistical Methods in Clinical Research - A. Farrell Focus Chapter: Publishing and Communicating Research Findings: Seeking Scientific Objectivity - L. Beutler & B. Martin AREAS OF CLINICAL RESEARCH: ASSESSMENT Psychometric Issues in Assessment Research - S. Haynes, et al. Research Design in Objective Personality Assessment - J. Butcher Observational Assessment: Measure Development and Research Issues - J. Cone Focus Chapter: Methodological Issues in Research Using Projective Methods - D. Westen, et al. Focus Chapter: Methodological Issues in Research on Neuropsychological and Intellectual Assessment - G. Prigatano & J. DeLuca Focus Chapter: Methodological Issues in Psychophysiological Research - A. Tomarken Focus Chapter: Item Response Theory in Assessment Research - S. Embretson & K. Prenovost AREAS OF CLINICAL RESEARCH: TREATMENT Application of Time-Series - Single-Subject) Designs in Clinical Psychology - S. Gaynor, et al. Therapy Outcome Research Methods - P. Kendall, et al. Treatment Process Research Methods - W. Stiles, et al. Focus Chapter: Research Methods in Community-Based Treatment and Prevention - P. Tolan Focus Chapter: Meta-Analytic Research Methods - J. Durlak AREAS OF CLINICAL RESEARCH: PSYCHOPATHOLOGY AND HEALTH Conceptual and Methodological Issues in Developmental Psychopathology Research - D. Cicchetti & F. Rogosch Research Methods in Adults Psychopathology - L. Alloy, et al. Methodological Issues in Adult Health Psychology - T. Smith & J. Ruiz Focus Chapter: Research Methods in Pediatric Psychology - A. La Greca & W. Schuman Focus Chapter: Research Methods in Behavioral Genetics - S. Moldin Focus Chapter: Research Methods in the Study of Sexual Behavior - J. St. Lawrence & M. McFarlane SPECIAL POPULATIONS Focus Chapter: Research Methods with Children - J. Culbertson Focus Chapter: Research Methods with Adolescents - G. Holmbeck & W. Shapera Focus Chapter: Research Methods with Older Adults - B. Rybarczyk & M. Lopez Focus Chapter: Research Methods with Couples - K. Eldridge, et al. Focus Chapter: Research Methods with Families - T. Jacob, et al. Indexes.
The competency of any intelligent agent is bounded by its formal account of the world in which it operates. Clinical AI lacks such an account. Existing frameworks address evaluation, regulation, or system design in isolation, without a shared model of the clinical world to connect them. We introduce the Clinical World Model, a framework that formalizes care as a tripartite interaction among Patient, Provider, and Ecosystem. To formalize how any agent, whether human or artificial, transforms information into clinical action, we develop parallel decision-making architectures for providers, patients, and AI agents, grounded in validated principles of clinical cognition. The Clinical AI Skill-Mix operationalizes competency through eight dimensions. Five define the clinical competency space (condition, phase, care setting, provider role, and task) and three specify how AI engages human reasoning (assigned authority, agent facing, and anchoring layer). The combinatorial product of these dimensions yields a space of billions of distinct competency coordinates. A central structural implication is that validation within one coordinate provides minimal evidence for performance in another, re
Current clinical artificial intelligence (AI) systems are evaluated almost exclusively on clean, standardised, English-language inputs, conditions that do not reflect the realities of healthcare delivery in low-resource settings. This study presents the first systematic dual audit of two orthogonal safety vulnerabilities in clinical AI: adversarial image fragility and cross-lingual diagnostic drift. Using DenseNet121, the architecture underlying CheXNet, fine-tuned on the COVID-QU-Ex chest X-ray dataset (85,318 images; COVID-19, Non-COVID Pneumonia, Normal), we demonstrate that diagnostic accuracy collapses from 89.3% to 62.0% under a Fast Gradient Method (FGM) perturbation of epsilon=0.021, a magnitude imperceptible to the human eye. Standard defensive strategies including Gaussian smoothing and ensemble voting failed to restore clinical safety. In a parallel language fragility experiment, we tested Llama3.1:8b and NatLAS (N-ATLAS) on 20 COVID-19 clinical cases presented in Standard English, Nigerian Pidgin (Naija), and Yoruba-inflected English. Both models exhibited significant accuracy degradation: Llama3.1:8b dropped from 80.0% to 65.0% on Pidgin; NatLAS, an African-context mod
Developing AI models that are useful in clinical practice, requires efficient collaboration between clinicians and AI developers. This poses a practical challenge: clinicians must repeatedly communicate and refine their requirements with AI developers before those requirements can be translated into executable model development. This iterative process is time-consuming, and even after repeated discussion, misalignment may still exist because the two sides do not fully share each other's expertise. Coding agents may help close this gap. They can write and refine code on their own, and they carry working knowledge of both medicine and AI to understand commands formulated by both medical experts and developers. We present a prototype that lets clinicians drive AI development directly. A clinician describes the task in plain language, and the system turns the description into a working pipeline, refines it through repeated experiments together with the clinician, and returns a model that meets the stated clinical objective. Across five clinical tasks, the system reliably produces models that matched the clinician's request and reached competitive performance. Most notably, on chest rad
The increasing availability of unstructured clinical narratives in electronic health records (EHRs) has created new opportunities for automated disease characterization, cohort identification, and clinical decision support. However, modeling long, domain-specific clinical text remains challenging due to limited labeled data, severe class imbalance, and the high computational cost of adapting large pretrained language models. This study presents a GPT-based architecture for clinical text classification that adapts a pretrained decoder-only Transformer using a selective fine-tuning strategy. Rather than updating all model parameters, the majority of the GPT-2 backbone is frozen, and training is restricted to the final Transformer block, the final layer normalization, and a lightweight classification head. This approach substantially reduces the number of trainable parameters while preserving the representational capacity required to model complex clinical language. The proposed method is evaluated on radiology reports from the MIMIC-IV-Note dataset using uncertainty-aware CheXpert-style labels derived directly from report text. Experiments cover multiple problem formulations, includi
We introduce Clinical ModernBERT, a transformer based encoder pretrained on large scale biomedical literature, clinical notes, and medical ontologies, incorporating PubMed abstracts, MIMIC IV clinical data, and medical codes with their textual descriptions. Building on ModernBERT the current state of the art natural language text encoder featuring architectural upgrades such as rotary positional embeddings (RoPE), Flash Attention, and extended context length up to 8,192 tokens our model adapts these innovations specifically for biomedical and clinical domains. Clinical ModernBERT excels at producing semantically rich representations tailored for long context tasks. We validate this both by analyzing its pretrained weights and through empirical evaluation on a comprehensive suite of clinical NLP benchmarks.
We introduce SoftTiger, a clinical large language model (CLaM) designed as a foundation model for healthcare workflows. The narrative and unstructured nature of clinical notes is a major obstacle for healthcare intelligentization. We address a critical problem of structuring clinical notes into clinical data, according to international interoperability standards. We collect and annotate data for three subtasks, namely, international patient summary, clinical impression and medical encounter. We then supervised fine-tuned a state-of-the-art LLM using public and credentialed clinical data. The training is orchestrated in a way that the target model can first support basic clinical tasks such as abbreviation expansion and temporal information extraction, and then learn to perform more complex downstream clinical tasks. Moreover, we address several modeling challenges in the healthcare context, e.g., extra long context window. Our blind pairwise evaluation shows that SoftTiger outperforms other popular open-source models and GPT-3.5, comparable to Gemini-pro, with a mild gap from GPT-4. We believe that LLMs may become a step-stone towards healthcare digitalization and democratization.
Introduction: Semantic search, which retrieves documents based on conceptual similarity rather than keyword matching, offers substantial advantages for retrieval of clinical information. However, deploying semantic search across entire health systems, comprising hundreds of millions of clinical notes, presents formidable engineering, cost, and governance challenges that have prevented adoption. Methods: We deployed a semantic search system at a large children's hospital indexing 166 million clinical notes (484 million vectors) from 1.68 million patients. The system uses instruction-tuned qwen3-embedding-0.6B embeddings, stores vectors in a managed database with storage-optimized indexing, maintains full-text metadata in a low-latency key-value store, and operates within a HIPAA-compliant governance framework. We evaluated the system through three experiments: optimization of embedding model and chunking strategy using a physician-authored benchmark dataset, characterization of full-scale performance (cost, latency, retrieval quality), and clinical utility assessment via comparison of chart abstraction efficiency across three tasks. Results: The system delivers sub-second query late
Empiric antibiotic prescribing in high-risk clinical contexts often requires decision making under conditions of incomplete information, where inappropriate coverage or unjustified escalation may compromise safety and antimicrobial stewardship. While clinical decision-support systems have been proposed to assist in this process, many approaches lack explicit governance and evaluation mechanisms defining scope, abstention conditions, recommendation permissibility, and expected system behavior. This work specifies a governance and evaluation framework for deterministic clinical decision-support systems operating under explicitly constrained scope. Deterministic behavior is adopted to ensure that identical inputs yield identical outputs, supporting transparency, auditability, and conservative decision support in high-risk prescribing contexts. The framework treats governance as a first-class design component, separating clinical decision logic from rule-based mechanisms that determine whether a recommendation may be issued. Explicit abstention, deterministic stewardship constraints, and exclusion rules are formalized as core constructs. The framework defines an evaluation methodology
When OpenAI deprecated GPT-4o in early 2026, thousands of users protested under #keep4o, claiming newer models had "lost their empathy." No published study has tested this claim. We conducted the first clinical measurement, evaluating three OpenAI model generations (GPT-4o, o4-mini, GPT-5-mini) across 14 emotionally challenging conversational scenarios in mental health and AI companion domains, producing 2,100 scored AI responses assessed on six psychological safety dimensions using clinically-grounded rubrics. Empathy scores are statistically indistinguishable across all three models (Kruskal-Wallis H=4.33, p=0.115). What changed is the safety posture: crisis detection improved monotonically from GPT-4o to GPT-5-mini (H=13.88, p=0.001), while advice safety declined (H=16.63, p<0.001). Per-turn trajectory analysis -- a novel methodological contribution -- reveals these shifts are sharpest during mid-conversation crisis moments invisible to aggregate scoring. In a self-harm scenario involving a minor, GPT-4o scored 3.6/10 on crisis detection during early disclosure turns; GPT-5-mini never dropped below 7.8. What users perceived as "lost empathy" was a shift from a cautious model
Despite the plethora of AI-based algorithms developed for anomaly detection in radiology, subsequent integration into clinical setting is rarely evaluated. In this work, we assess the applicability and utility of an AI-based model for brain aneurysm detection comparing the performance of two readers with different levels of experience (2 and 13 years). We aim to answer the following questions: 1) Do the readers improve their performance when assisted by the AI algorithm? 2) How much does the AI algorithm impact routine clinical workflow? We reuse and enlarge our open-access, Time-Of-Flight Magnetic Resonance Angiography dataset (N=460). We use 360 subjects for training/validating our algorithm and 100 as unseen test set for the reading session. Even though our model reaches state-of-the-art results on the test set (sensitivity=74%, false positive rate=1.6), we show that neither the junior nor the senior reader significantly increase their sensitivity (p=0.59, p=1, respectively). In addition, we find that reading time for both readers is significantly higher in the "AI-assisted" setting than in the "Unassisted" (+15 seconds, on average; p=3x10^(-4) junior, p=3x10^(-5) senior). The c
We evaluate the impact of large language model-based clinical decision support in live care. In partnership with Penda Health, a network of primary care clinics in Nairobi, Kenya, we studied AI Consult, a tool that serves as a safety net for clinicians by identifying potential documentation and clinical decision-making errors. AI Consult integrates into clinician workflows, activating only when needed and preserving clinician autonomy. We conducted a quality improvement study, comparing outcomes for 39,849 patient visits performed by clinicians with or without access to AI Consult across 15 clinics. Visits were rated by independent physicians to identify clinical errors. Clinicians with access to AI Consult made relatively fewer errors: 16% fewer diagnostic errors and 13% fewer treatment errors. In absolute terms, the introduction of AI Consult would avert diagnostic errors in 22,000 visits and treatment errors in 29,000 visits annually at Penda alone. In a survey of clinicians with AI Consult, all clinicians said that AI Consult improved the quality of care they delivered, with 75% saying the effect was "substantial". These results required a clinical workflow-aligned AI Consult i
Digital Twins hold great potential to personalize clinical patient care, provided the concept is translated to meet specific requirements emerging from established clinical workflows. We present a general and unspecialized Digital Twin design combining knowledge graphs and ensemble learning to reflect the entire patient's clinical journey and assist clinicians in their decision-making. Such a design is predictive, modular, evolving, informed, interpretable and explainable, thus opening broad clinical applications.
Bioinformatics platforms have significantly changed clinical diagnostics by facilitating the analysis of genomic data, thereby advancing personalized medicine and improving patient care. This study examines the integration, usage patterns, challenges, and impact of the Galaxy platform within clinical diagnostics laboratories. We employed a convergent parallel mixed-methods design, collecting quantitative survey data and qualitative insights from structured interviews with fifteen participants across various clinical roles. The findings indicate a wide adoption of Galaxy, with participants expressing high satisfaction due to its user-friendly interface and notable improvements in workflow efficiency and diagnostic accuracy. Challenges such as data security and training needs were also identified, highlighting the platform's role in simplifying complex data analysis tasks. This study contributes to understanding the transformative potential of Galaxy in clinical practice and offers recommendations for optimizing its integration and functionality. These insights are crucial for advancing clinical diagnostics and enhancing patient outcomes.
This paper is dedicated to the design and evaluation of the first AMR parser tailored for clinical notes. Our objective was to facilitate the precise transformation of the clinical notes into structured AMR expressions, thereby enhancing the interpretability and usability of clinical text data at scale. Leveraging the colon cancer dataset from the Temporal Histories of Your Medical Events (THYME) corpus, we adapted a state-of-the-art AMR parser utilizing continuous training. Our approach incorporates data augmentation techniques to enhance the accuracy of AMR structure predictions. Notably, through this learning strategy, our parser achieved an impressive F1 score of 88% on the THYME corpus's colon cancer dataset. Moreover, our research delved into the efficacy of data required for domain adaptation within the realm of clinical notes, presenting domain adaptation data requirements for AMR parsing. This exploration not only underscores the parser's robust performance but also highlights its potential in facilitating a deeper understanding of clinical narratives through structured semantic representations.
Accurate segmentation of pulmonary vessels plays a very critical role in diagnosing and assessing various lung diseases. Currently, many automated algorithms are primarily targeted at CTPA (Computed Tomography Pulmonary Angiography) types of data. However, the segmentation precision of these methods is insufficient, and support for NCCT (Non-Contrast Computed Tomography) types of data is also a requirement in some clinical scenarios. In this study, we propose a 3D image segmentation algorithm for automated pulmonary vessel segmentation from both contrast-enhanced and non-contrast CT images. In the network, we designed a Vessel Lumen Structure Optimization Module (VLSOM), which extracts the centerline (Cl) of vessels and adjusts the weights based on the positional information and adds a Cl-Dice Loss to supervise the stability of the vessels structure. We used 427 sets of high-precision annotated CT data from multiple vendors and countries to train the model and achieved Cl-DICE, Cl-Recall, and Recall values of 0.892, 0.861, 0.924 for CTPA data and 0.925, 0.903, 0.949 for NCCT data. This shows that our model has achieved good performance in both accuracy and completeness of pulmonary