Evaluating the Safety of Deep Learning-Based Brain MRI Reconstruction

Objective: Deep learning accelerates brain MRI four- to tenfold, but models can erase lesions or synthesize false tissue - failures pixel-averaged metrics like PSNR and SSIM miss. We review whether current evaluation practices detect this blind spot. Methods: Following PRISMA 2020, we searched seven databases without date limits, including 263 studies (1995-2026), appraised them using QUADAS-2 and matched instruments, and synthesized narratively. Categories were derived from titles, abstracts, and controlled vocabulary; reported prevalence figures represent floors. Duplicate screening achieved high agreement (Fleiss kappa = 0.877), as did appraisal (0.788; 0.390 where observable). Extraction is unaudited. Results: Only 18 of 263 studies (6.8%) recorded both a fidelity metric and reader assessment on identical data, leaving the central surrogate unmeasured. Reader studies mostly measured inter-reader agreement, which was weak: fastMRI 2020 concordance reached 0.457 and 0.386 (Kendall W), improving only where SSIM diverged. Erasing a 100 mm3 lacunar infarct shifts global PSNR by 0.03 dB under the stated error model. As the corpus grew fivefold, reader assessments dropped from 32% to 18%, recovering to 21%. Generative models - most associated with hallucination (39%) - were among the least reader-evaluated (11.3%), while self-supervised models reached 47% with zero reader evaluation. Only 5% released code and ran reader studies; none evaluated a model observer; no named dataset covered acute stroke or hemorrhage. Conclusions: On these floors, current evaluation practices cannot certify diagnostic safety. We derive five requirements safety-oriented evaluations must meet.

A systematic review of machine learning techniques to address diagnosis and treatment of autism: challenges and opportunities

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental disability characterized by challenges in social interaction and communication. As the causes of ASD remain unclear, identifying relevant features and hidden correlations is crucial for early diagnosis. This systematic review evaluates 55 studies from 2017 to 2023 on the application of machine learning (ML) techniques to ASD. The primary objective is to examine recent ML applications in ASD research, identifying trends, techniques, and datasets that enhance diagnosis and treatment. Supervised learning methods dominate, as they align well with ASD diagnostic needs; however, the role of deep learning is expanding with greater data availability. Emerging techniques based on hybrid methods, where unsupervised, deep learning, and fuzzy logic could be included, will be interesting to observe in the future. The review highlights key challenges and opportunities, particularly the need for models that can integrate complex data -such as genetic and clinical information- to improve diagnostic accuracy and treatment outcomes. Additionally, incorporating innovative data sources, like wearable devices and biometric sensors, could enable continuous and non-intrusive monitoring, providing a more holistic understanding of ASD. Findings emphasize that addressing current challenges requires interdisciplinary collaboration and expanded datasets tailored to ASD. Future ML models will benefit from broader multimodal data integration, enabling researchers to more comprehensively address the complexities of ASD.

Artificial Intelligence Can Match Domain Experts in Evidence Extraction and Critical Appraisal of Microbial Oncogenesis Research Publications

Confirmed oncogenic microbes contribute significantly to cancer burden. Identifying novel microbial oncogenicity could yield strategies that will reduce disease burdens. However, relevant evidence is dispersed and infeasible for humans to comprehensively synthesize. LLMs may enable scalable, expert-level systematic evidence synthesis to identify microbe-cancer pairs; however, such capabilities have not yet been demonstrated. Domain experts were recruited to create a dataset to benchmark LLM performance (Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Flash, GPT-5, GPT-5 Nano) on 24 research papers using MMTV-LV and breast cancer as a case study. We devised a structured template for evidence extraction and appraisal, consisting of MCQ, Likert-scale, multi-select, and free-text question types (77 items across 24 papers). Agreement between (1) experts and (2) experts and each LLM was determined per question instance using novel metrics. LLMs were assessed by comparing inter-expert and expert-LLM agreement distributions to determine whether LLMs behaved as additional experts by increasing or maintaining inter-expert agreement. Free-text responses were further evaluated qualitatively. Across all question types, LLM responses aligned closely with experts, with GPT-5 and GPT-5 Nano achieving score distributions indistinguishable from experts. Gemini models behaved similarly but were significantly more lenient in applying microbial oncogenesis criteria. Hallucinations were rare. Methodological appraisal and identification of contradictions within full-texts were the most persistent LLM vulnerabilities. GPT-5 and GPT-5 Nano were indistinguishable from experts on structured domain research paper evaluation tasks. This supports use of LLMs for automated systematic evidence synthesis. However, methodological appraisal tasks and contradiction identification in full-texts remain weaknesses requiring strengthening.

Authoring and Management of Transparent Research Integrity Assessments of Randomised Clinical Trial Publications Using LLM-assisted Tools and Provenance Knowledge Graphs

Systematic reviews of Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) are routinely used as evidence for clinical care guidelines. Such evidence has to meet high research integrity standards to prevent low quality or false research outputs influencing the clinical care. However, assessing research integrity of published RCTs is a complex process requiring manual effort, and potentially resulting in diverse opinions of the human assessors. This paper describes INSPECT-AI, an LLM-based interactive tool that assists human reviewers with research integrity assessments of published RCTs based on the community approved INSPECT-SR framework, and the Research Integrity Provenance and Evidence ontology (RIPE-O) for documenting the provenance of the assessment process. In addition, we present the Research Integrity Provenance and Evidence knowledge graph (RIPE-KG), an initial set of 140 expert research integrity assessments of 95 RCT publications generated by INSPECT-AI and described using RIPE-O.

Evaluation design conditions the expert-vs-auto MeSH gap: a controlled comparison of bag-of-words and BiomedBERT on the Cohen benchmark

A systematic review begins with someone reading thousands of abstracts to identify the few that are relevant, and classifiers are used to prioritise that reading. Their inputs are often augmented with Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), assigned either by expert indexers weeks or months after publication or by automatic tools at once. We did not identify prior work comparing the two directly as classifier features, or asking whether that comparison's outcome depends on how the classifier is evaluated. Using the Cohen et al. (2006) drug-class benchmark, we compare expert assignment against one mechanical procedure, substring matching against a MeSH vocabulary drawn from the benchmark, across a bag-of-words logistic regression classifier (seven reruns) and BiomedBERT (five seeds) on three topics. Under the canonical 5-fold full-corpus design the bag-of-words gap on Statins is +0.096 WSS@95%. Stratified subsampling to matched corpus size (n=803) reduces it by roughly two thirds, to +0.033, with a bootstrap interval that includes zero; 10-fold cross-validation at full corpus size reduces it by roughly four fifths, to +0.021. BiomedBERT under canonical evaluation gives +0.020, a difference of 0.001 from the bag-of-words 10-fold result. An empirical power analysis on a single canonical run per topic indicates that a Statins-sized effect at the per-fold variances of the other two topics would not have been detectable at that design (MDE 0.254 for Opioids, 0.384 for ADHD); at the pooled fold count of the multi-run protocol the bound depends on an effective sample size the design does not determine. The results bound the specific lexical matcher tested rather than automatic MeSH indexing in general. More broadly, benchmark conclusions about feature sources can change substantially under reasonable changes to the evaluation design.

Evaluating Reliability in Machine Learning Models for Early Chronic Kidney Disease Prediction: A Systematic Review of Data Leakage and Predictor Stability

The early detection of Chronic Kidney Disease using machine learning has attracted significant interest in healthcare-related computer science. Despite rapid advancements in this field, many reported studies remain inconsistent and potentially misleading. A significant drawback is the lack of organized evaluation regarding methodological concerns. Key issues include data leakage, limited access to temporal patient records and inconsistency in reported clinical indicators. This research offers a systematic literature review of existing CKD prediction studies using interpretable machine learning techniques, where nineteen relevant studies were selected via systematic searches across major academic databases. To assess methodological reliability, this study introduces a structured taxonomy of information leakage and a quantitative leakage scoring framework to systematically evaluate reliability across CKD prediction studies. The analysis reveals a strong relationship between leakage and inflated performance. Here, High leakage-studies report an average accuracy of 95.48%, compared to 80.2% for leakage-free studies, reflecting an increase of approximately 15.28%. Furthermore, a cross-study feature stability analysis shows that only a small subset of predictors is consistently reproducible, with over 80% lacking reliability. Overall, the findings suggest that many reported performance improvements stem from methodological limitations rather than true predictive capability.

Large AI Models in Dental Healthcare: From General-Purpose Systems to Domain-Specific Foundation Models

Background: Oral diseases affect nearly 3.5 billion people worldwide, yet the comparative clinical potential of large-scale AI models in dentistry remains poorly understood. Three distinct model categories have emerged: language-generative models, discriminative vision foundation models, and dental-specific foundation models, with no unified review examining their relationships and collective limitations. Methods: Following PRISMA-ScR guidelines, we systematically searched four databases (PubMed, Google Scholar, Scopus, arXiv), screened independently by two reviewers. After applying inclusion/exclusion criteria, 97 studies (2020-2026) were included. We propose a two-dimensional classification framework organizing models by architectural paradigm and dental specialization degree. Results: Language-generative models excel at text-based tasks (clinical reasoning, licensing exams, patient communication) but show inconsistent performance on image-dependent diagnostics. Adapted SAM and CLIP variants achieve strong tooth segmentation and lesion detection results. Dental-specific models (DentVFM, DentVLM, OralGPT) demonstrate strongest performance on complex multimodal tasks. Integrated pipelines consistently outperform single-model approaches. A data asymmetry is observed: dental-specific pretraining concentrates almost entirely in the vision domain, reflecting scarce large-scale dental text corpora. Conclusions: General-purpose and dental-specific models play complementary roles; the most effective systems combine both within structured pipelines. Safe autonomous deployment requires resolving three persistent barriers: hallucination in generative models, limited annotated dental datasets, and absent standardized clinical evaluation benchmarks.

AutoForest: Automatically Generating Forest Plots from Biomedical Studies with End-to-End Evidence Extraction and Synthesis

Systematic reviews rely on forest plots to synthesise quantitative evidence across biomedical studies, but generating them remains a fragmented and labour-intensive process. Researchers must interpret complex clinical texts, manually extract outcome data from trials, define appropriate interventions and comparators, harmonise inconsistent study designs, and carry out meta-analytic computations-typically using specialised software that demands structured inputs and domain expertise. While recent work has demonstrated that large language models can extract study-level data from unstructured text, no existing system automates the complete pipeline from raw documents to synthesised forest plots. To address this gap, we introduce AutoForest, the first end-to-end system that generates publication-ready forest plots directly from biomedical papers. Given one or more study papers, AutoForest automatically suggests ICO (Intervention, Comparator, Outcome) elements, extracts outcome data, performs statistical synthesis, and renders the final forest plot. We describe the system architecture, user interface and demonstrate its effectiveness on real-world examples through a user study involving clinicians, showing how AutoForest can accelerate evidence synthesis and substantially lower the barrier to conducting meta-analyses.