Medicine & Health

This review states that microbial diversity underpins human health, agricultural productivity, ecological balance, and ecosystem functioning, and it surveys the role of the gut microbial community in immune regulation, metabolism, and disease prevention, the contributions of interactions among plants, fungi, bacteria, and other soil microorganisms to carbon sequestration, nutrient cycling, stress resilience, and sustainable agricultural productivity in terrestrial ecosystems, and emerging microbiome-based therapies such as precision probiotics, postbiotics, faecal microbiota transplantation, and personalized microbiome medicine, while noting that multi-omic techniques, synthetic microbial genomes, microbiome engineering, and artificial intelligence enable emerging uses in agriculture, envi

Using a Nominal Group Technique session (May 2025, n=6) and a two-round modified Delphi process (April–May 2026, expert panel n=13 across 12 academic medical centers, with 77% Round 1 and 100% Round 2 response rates), this study developed the first specialty-specific AI competency framework for a United States medical specialty, comprising 5 themes (Communicating about AI, Understanding appropriate use cases, Interacting with AI, AI risk management, Cognitive impacts of AI), 5 derived competencies (one-to-one theme-to-competency mapping endorsed by 12 of 13 panelists), 19 subthemes, and 10 retained clinical scenarios, with all themes, derived competencies, and individually rated subthemes meeting pre-specified consensus thresholds and 9 of 10 scenarios reaching consensus while 1 was retain

This narrative review, based on structured searches of PubMed and ScienceDirect (2016-2026, plus a clinical-research-focused search for 2013-2026) supplemented by FDA, EMA, Cochrane Library, and industry sources, examines medical device safety across the full lifecycle from early design and clinical investigation through regulatory review, postmarket surveillance, software change management, cybersecurity, and AI/ML-enabled device oversight, arguing that device safety requires a broader socio-technical framework than drug safety and that safety evidence is shifting from retrospective, passive reporting toward proactive, real-time, lifecycle-based generation.

This review focuses on liquid biopsy for glioblastoma, noting that tissue biopsy is invasive and fails to capture tumor heterogeneity or temporal dynamics, while liquid biopsy can provide noninvasive real-time monitoring via circulating biomarkers such as cell-free DNA, circulating tumor DNA, circulating tumor cells, and extracellular vesicles in plasma, cerebrospinal fluid, urine, and saliva; it advances beyond prior biomarker catalogs by delivering a quantitative technology scorecard comparing cfDNA-, CTC-, and EV-based platforms in terms of sensitivity, clinical actionability, cost, and scalability, and introduces a multimodal decision matrix and an AI-driven fusion pipeline integrating fragmentomics, EV proteomics, and CTC transcriptomics to enhance minimal residual disease detection a

This article synthesizes early cross-project insights from the 5 projects funded by the Augmented Intelligence in Medicine and Healthcare Initiative (AIM-HI), led by Kaiser Permanente and funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and selected through a national, multistage review process using a structured scoring rubric, covering sepsis management, venous thromboembolism risk assessment, diabetic retinopathy screening, cardiac amyloidosis detection, and pediatric asthma risk prediction; it reports that real-world AI deployment was feasible across varied clinical environments, that common challenges included electronic health record integration, data complexity, regulatory requirements, and variation in clinical workflows, and that implementation success depends on thoughtful integra

OPTIMUST was a prospective, single-center implementation study in which physicians without formal echocardiography certification completed a structured two-month curriculum and performed focused examinations using Caption AI-enabled handheld ultrasound on cardiology and non-cardiology wards; of 287 attempted examinations, 206 (71.8%) were analyzable, operator assessment correlated with expert review of the same handheld image sets for LVEF (r = 0.84), filling-pressure category agreement gave a quadratic weighted κ of 0.659, physicians reported that handheld findings changed or confirmed management in 93.7% of examinations, and 32.8% underwent comprehensive echocardiography within one month.