Traditionally, studies in experimental physiology have been conducted in small groups of human participants, animal models or cell lines. Identifying optimal study designs that achieve sufficient power for drawing proper statistical inferences to detect group level effects with small sample sizes has been challenging. Moreover, average effects derived from traditional group-level inference do not necessarily apply to individual participants. Here, we introduce N-of-1 trials as an innovative study design that can be used to draw valid statistical inference about the effects of interventions on individual participants and can be aggregated across multiple study participants to provide population-level inferences more efficiently than standard group randomized trials. N-of-1 trials have been used in healthcare settings since the late 1980s, but without large-scale adoption and with few applications in experimental physiology research settings. In this manuscript, we introduce the key components and design features of N-of-1 trials, describe statistical analysis and interpretations of the results, and describe some available digital tools to facilitate their use using examples from exp
Dietary flavonoids associate with disease prevention in epidemiological studies, yet their polypharmacological mechanisms remain unclear. We establish network pharmacology as a systematic framework to characterize flavonoid therapeutic properties through integrated computational, experimental, and epidemiological validation. We constructed a master network of 17,869 human proteins, 14 dietary flavonoids, and 1,496 FDA-approved drugs with 278,768 interactions. Flavonoids averaged 45.3 target proteins per compound compared to 16.8 for FDA-approved drugs (2.7-fold higher; p=7.5x10^-4), reflecting multi-target architecture. Statistical analysis revealed that 71.4% of flavonoids targeted proteins associated with cardiovascular drugs and 78.6% aligned with antineoplastic drug targets. MTT-based Jurkat cell assays confirmed network predictions: high-association flavonoids (luteolin LC50=31.4 microM, myricetin=29.5 microM) produced strong cytotoxicity, while low-association flavonoids showed minimal activity (LC50>200 microM). Network-predicted association strengths correlated with experimental bioactivity (Pearson r=0.918; R^2=0.843). We translated network associations into food-level
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
Understanding how human health changes over time, and why responses to interventions vary between individuals, remains a central challenge in medicine. Here we present HealthFormer, a decoder-only transformer that models the human physiological trajectory generatively, by training on data from the Human Phenotype Project, a multi-visit cohort of over 15,000 deeply phenotyped individuals. We tokenise each participant's health trajectory across 667 measurements spanning seven domains: blood biomarkers, body composition, sleep physiology, continuous glucose monitoring, gut microbiome, wearable-derived physiology, and behaviour and medication exposure. We train HealthFormer to forecast individual physiological trajectories across these domains, and from this single generative objective a range of clinically relevant tasks can be expressed as queries on the model. We show that, without task-specific training, HealthFormer transfers to four independent cohorts and improves prediction for 27 of 30 incident-disease and mortality endpoints, exceeding established clinical risk scores in every comparison. We further show that the model can simulate interventions in silico: in a held-out perso
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
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.
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
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.
This paper describes our approach to the MEDIQA-CORR shared task, which involves error detection and correction in clinical notes curated by medical professionals. This task involves handling three subtasks: detecting the presence of errors, identifying the specific sentence containing the error, and correcting it. Through our work, we aim to assess the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on a vast corpora of internet data that contain both factual and unreliable information. We propose to comprehensively address all subtasks together, and suggest employing a unique prompt-based in-context learning strategy. We will evaluate its efficacy in this specialized task demanding a combination of general reasoning and medical knowledge. In medical systems where prediction errors can have grave consequences, we propose leveraging self-consistency and ensemble methods to enhance error correction and error detection performance.
Background: LLM judges increasingly score whether clinical language models give overconfident answers under incomplete evidence, yet whether a measured "safety gain" reflects real behavior change or the judge's calibration is unresolved. Using a structured evidence-sufficiency prompt as a test case, we asked whether it reduces unsafe overconfident answers, how far that effect depends on the scoring judge, and what it costs in helpfulness. Methods: In a retrospective public-data benchmark (Real-POCQi, HealthBench, MedRBench), four models (GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.8, Gemini 3.5 Flash, Grok 4.3) answered a fully paired common panel (1,200 cells) with a standard prompt and the wrapper. The pre-specified endpoint was the paired reduction in unsafe overconfidence scored by the primary judge (GPT-5.4-nano); secondary analyses added a different-family judge (Claude Sonnet 5), a correctness judge, matched scaffold controls, and a blinded three-clinician review. Results: Unsafe overconfidence fell from 49.3% to 24.7%, a paired reduction of 24.7 points (95% CI 21.8-27.7; p<0.001), robust in direction across models and paraphrases. Magnitude was judge-dependent: Sonnet agreed on direction but
Electrocardiogram (ECG)-based models have achieved strong performance in diagnostic tasks, yet they remain limited in modeling how cardiac dynamics evolve under external interventions. In particular, existing approaches focus primarily on static prediction and lack mechanisms to capture ECG variations under different pharmacological conditions. In this work, we propose an ECG World Model for action-conditioned predictive simulation of cardiac electrophysiology. Moving beyond disjoint pipelines, our framework features a principled integration of physiological ordinary differential equation (ODE) priors into latent diffusion dynamics via energy regularization. This structural constraint enables the synthesis of physiologically plausible post-intervention ECG trajectories while effectively mitigating generative hallucinations. Building on this simulation process, we introduce an uncertainty-aware evaluation strategy that leverages the stochasticity of diffusion sampling to characterize both the expected clinical risk and its variability, allowing a more reliable comparative assessment of candidate interventions. We evaluate our method across diverse settings, including controlled drug
Clinical trials are critical in advancing medical treatments but often suffer from immense time and financial burden. Advances in statistical methodologies and artificial intelligence (AI) present opportunities to address these inefficiencies. Here we introduce Prognostic Covariate-Adjusted Mixed Models for Repeated Measures (PROCOVA-MMRM) as an advantageous combination of prognostic covariate adjustment (PROCOVA) and Mixed Models for Repeated Measures (MMRM). PROCOVA-MMRM utilizes time-matched prognostic scores generated from AI models to enhance the precision of treatment effect estimators for longitudinal continuous outcomes, enabling reductions in sample size and enrollment times. We first provide a description of the background and implementation of PROCOVA-MMRM, followed by two case study reanalyses where we compare the performance of PROCOVA-MMRM versus the unadjusted MMRM. These reanalyses demonstrate significant improvements in statistical power and precision in clinical indications with unmet medical need, specifically Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). We also explore the potential for sample size reduction with the prospective implementati
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.
Timely and interpretable early warning of sepsis remains a major clinical challenge due to the complex temporal dynamics of physiological deterioration. Traditional data-driven models often provide accurate yet opaque predictions, limiting physicians' confidence and clinical applicability. To address this limitation, we propose a Large Language Model (LLM)-guided temporal simulation framework that explicitly models physiological trajectories prior to disease onset for clinically interpretable prediction. The framework consists of a spatiotemporal feature extraction module that captures dynamic dependencies among multivariate vital signs, a Medical Prompt-as-Prefix module that embeds clinical reasoning cues into LLMs, and an agent-based post-processing component that constrains predictions within physiologically plausible ranges. By first simulating the evolution of key physiological indicators and then classifying sepsis onset, our model offers transparent prediction mechanisms that align with clinical judgment. Evaluated on the MIMIC-IV and eICU databases, the proposed method achieves superior AUC scores (0.861-0.903) across 24-4-hour pre-onset prediction tasks, outperforming conv
Autoregressive models can predict clinical events, but generating patient-conditioned multi-step trajectories that respond to intervention tokens and testing whether those responses preserve known pharmacological associations has received limited attention. We present FlatASCEND, a 14.5M-parameter autoregressive clinical sequence model using flat composite tokens and a zero-inflated log-normal time head. Standard distributional metrics (Jaccard 0.889-0.954) do not distinguish FlatASCEND from trivial baselines; the model's value lies in conditional generation from patient-specific prefixes. A prompt-shuffle ablation shows patient-specific conditioning amplifies mechanistic pharmacological effects (2.0-2.2x for steroid to glucose, diuretic to potassium) while leaving confounding-driven associations unchanged (0.9x for insulin to glucose). An incident-user framework assesses directional consistency against prior pharmacological knowledge on MIMIC-IV (N=500 per comparison): 4/10 recover correct mechanistic directions, 2 reproduce treatment-context associations, 4 are incorrect (9/10 significant, Wilcoxon p<0.05). This pattern - partial recovery under residual confounding - is consis
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
Continuous physiological monitoring using consumer-grade wearables offers a transformative opportunity for clinical care and research, yet integration remains hindered by device heterogeneity, proprietary data formats, and strict regulatory requirements. We present an event-driven, cloud-native system designed to ingest, normalize, and analyze high-frequency vital signs from wearables at scale and without vendor lock-in. The system design proposes a multi-layered microservice architecture using cluster orchestration. Data acquisition is handled via a cross-platform mobile application that leverages native health frameworks, ensuring compatibility across fragmented device ecosystems. To address interoperability, we implement an event-driven transformation pipeline using stream processing engines and specialized services to map raw measurements to the FHIR standard for medical interoperability. Our novel dependency-aware FHIR minimization scheme reduces storage overhead while maintaining lossless resource reconstruction. Furthermore, the platform integrates a modular data analytics and machine learning layer based on a medallion lakehouse architecture, supporting the full machine lea
Introduction: Semantic search, which retrieves documents based on conceptual similarity rather than keywords, offers advantages for retrieval of clinical information. However, deploying semantic search across health systems, comprising hundreds of millions of clinical notes, presents formidable engineering, cost, and governance challenges that have prevented institutional adoption. Methods: We deployed a semantic search system at a large children's hospital indexing 166 million clinical notes (484 million embedding vectors) from 1.68 million patients. The system uses instruction-tuned qwen3-embedding-0.6B embeddings, stores vectors 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 by optimizing the model and chunking strategy using a physician-authored benchmark, characterizing full-scale performance (cost, latency, retrieval quality), and assessing clinical utility via chart abstraction efficiency and comparison to ICD-10 cohort generation. Results: The system delivers sub-second query latency with monthly operational costs of ~USD 4,000. Qwen3 embeddin
Clinical NLP increasingly relies on electronic health record (EHR) data to detect suicidal behaviors, treating clinical documentation as more reliable ground truth than social media. We argue that this framing obscures how EHR-based suicidality datasets encode a particular operationalization of suicidality, shaped by who authors the data, how episodes are bounded, and how ambiguity is resolved. We ground this argument in a case study of the ScAN dataset, built over MIMIC-III clinical notes. We show how governance constraints, ICD-based cohort selection, single-annotator labeling, and hospital-stay-level aggregation produce labels that reflect clinician-documented judgments, treat suicidality as a bounded episode, and assume that intent can be reliably inferred from documentation. A linguistic analysis demonstrates that identical labels subsume heterogeneous clinical framings differing in temporality, negation, and uncertainty. We argue that clinical NLP should examine the assumptions embedded in suicidality datasets before interpreting their labels as ground truth.
Objective: Integrating EHR data with other resources is essential in rare disease research due to low disease prevalence. Such integration is dependent on the alignment of ontologies used for data annotation. The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is used to annotate clinical diagnoses; the Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) to annotate phenotypes. Although these ontologies overlap in biomedical entities described, the extent to which they are interoperable is unknown. We investigate how well aligned these ontologies are and whether such alignments facilitate EHR data integration. Materials and Methods: We conducted an empirical analysis of the coverage of mappings between ICD and HPO. We interpret this mapping coverage as a proxy for how easily clinical data can be integrated with research ontologies such as HPO. We quantify how exhaustively ICD codes are mapped to HPO by analyzing mappings in the UMLS Metathesaurus. We analyze the proportion of ICD codes mapped to HPO within a real-world EHR dataset. Results and Discussion: Our analysis revealed that only 2.2% of ICD codes have direct mappings to HPO in UMLS. Within our EHR dataset, less than 50% of ICD codes have mapping