Monthly update - April 2025
First I would like to congratulate my colleagues and friends Jakob German and Mattia Cordioli for their publication titled "Association between plausible genetic factors and weight loss from GLP1-RA and bariatric surgery" in nature medcine!
Also congratulations to Feiyi Wang and Aoxing Liu for their publication "Effects of parental autoimmune diseases on type 1 diabetes in offspring can be partially explained by HLA and non-HLA polymorphisms" in Cell genomics!
Top Picks of the Month
This month featured several interesting publications from many different fields, which made choosing a standout particularly difficult. I think I’ll give the crown to the Google Research team and their two Nature papers exploring the use of large language models in clinical diagnosis and patient interaction.
In the first paper, they introduce AMIE—a large language model designed for diagnostic reasoning—and evaluate its ability to generate differential diagnoses both independently and as a support tool for clinicians.
Towards Accurate Differential Diagnosis with Large Language Models
The second study examines AMIE’s broader performance across various aspects of clinical interaction, including history-taking, management, communication, and empathy. The model was tested against primary care physicians in a randomized, double-blind crossover study.
Towards Conversational Diagnostic Artificial Intelligence
Other Notable Mentions
DATA: proprietary
METHOD: Hierarchical Mixture of Experts (HMoE)
DATA: SHHS, CFS, MESA, MROS
METHOD: Transformer encoder + MLP decoder, Gaussian mixture model
DATA: Shenzhen Fuwai Hospital, Fuwai Yunnan Cardiovascular Hospital
METHOD: multi-modal fusion model (DAE + BERT + ViT)
DATA: Swedish MS Registry (SMSReg)
METHOD: LSTM + conformal prediction
Implementation of a national AI technology program on cardiovascular outcomes and the health system
DATA: FISH&CHIPS cohort
METHOD: Fractional Flow Reserve-Computed Tomography (FFR-CT)
Meta-prediction of coronary artery disease risk
DATA: UKBioBank, AllofUs
METHOD: meta-prediction (XGBoost of meta-features and baseline features)
Noninvasive early prediction of preeclampsia in pregnancy using retinal vascular features
DATA: Sun Yat-sen University First Affiliated Hospital (FAH) cohort
METHOD: multi-branch U-Net (RMHAS) for segmentation + LASSO logistic regression for prediction
Vision transformer based interpretable metabolic syndrome classification using retinal Images
DATA: H-PEACE study , ImageNet-1K, MEH-MIDAS, Kaggle EyePACS
METHOD: ViT pretrained with MAE
Assessment of a Polygenic Risk Score in Screening for Prostate Cancer
DATA: BARCODE1 study
METHOD: PRS
DATA: 10 biobanks
METHOD: -
DATA: MGH COVID study, KORA study
METHOD: conditional generative adversarial nets (cGAN)
DATA: Embase and Medline
METHOD: systematic review & meta-analysis
DATA: UKBB
METHOD: AU-Net
Adherence to life’s essential 8 is associated with delayed white matter aging
DATA: UKBB
METHOD: random forest + linear regression
Premature Mortality Attributable to Ultraprocessed Food Consumption in 8 Countries
DATA: 8 country cohorts
METHOD: meta-analysis
Application of large language models in medicine
DATA: -
METHOD: LLM
DATA: Yale New Haven Health System, MIMIC III, MIMIC IV
METHOD: LLM
DATA: 12 BioNLP benchmarks
METHOD: LLM
Foundation models for electronic health records. representation dynamics and transferability
DATA: MIMIC-IV + University of Chicago Medical Center (UCMC)
METHOD: foundation model
High-precision information retrieval for rapid clinical guideline updates
DATA: 1 guideline database + 3 clinical trial databases
METHOD: Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Normalization (NEN) + extraction of Population--Intervention--Comparison--Outcome (PICO) spans.
DATA: 35 singapore & 23 international guidelines + UpToDate articles
METHOD: LLM + Auto-Merging RAG
Sociodemographic biases in medical decision making by large language models
DATA: Mount Sinai Health System
METHOD: LLM
Final Notes
HAI released the "2025 AI Index Report", chapter 5 is about "Science and Medicine", read more about it here: https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report/science-and-medicine
This month I scanned a total of 30 publications spanning 12 different countries.
My top picks are based on my topics of interest—definitely a bit biased! If you came across any cool papers published in April 2025 (related to health data science topics) that you think deserved more recognition, please send them my way and I’ll try to include them in next month’s update!