News & Comment

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools for endoscopy are now entering clinical practice after demonstrating substantial improvements to polyp detection on colonoscopy. As this technology continues to mature, efforts to develop and validate a new frontier of possibilities—including diagnostic classification, risk stratification, and clinical outcomes assessment—are now underway. In npj Digital Medicine, scientists from Cosmo AI/Linkverse and collaborators report an extension to the first FDA-cleared AI tool for colonoscopy that goes beyond polyp detection to enable video-based diagnostic characterization.

Due to its enormous capacity for benefit, harm, and cost, health care is among the most tightly regulated industries in the world. But with the rise of smartphones, an explosion of direct-to-consumer mobile health applications has challenged the role of centralized gatekeepers. As interest in health apps continue to climb, national regulatory bodies have turned their attention toward strategies to protect consumers from apps that mine and sell health data, recommend unsafe practices, or simply do not work as advertised. To characterize the current state and outlook of these efforts, Essén and colleagues map the nascent landscape of national health app policies and raise several considerations for cross-border collaboration. Strategies to increase transparency, organize app marketplaces, and monitor existing apps are needed to ensure that the global wave of new digital health tools fulfills its promise to improve health at scale.

As clinicians and scientists gather more data on the clinical trajectory of COVID-19 and the biology of its causative agent, the SARS-CoV-2 virus, novel strategies are needed to integrate these data to inform new therapies. A recent study by Howell et al. introduces a network model of viral-host interactions to produce explainable and testable predictions for treatment effects. Their model was consistent with experimental data and recommended treatments, and one of its predicted drug combinations was validated through in vitro assays. These findings support the utility of computational strategies for leveraging the vast literature on COVID-19 to generate insights for drug repurposing.

The vital signs—temperature, heart rate, respiratory rate, and blood pressure—are indispensable in clinical decision-making. These metrics are widely used to identify physiologic decline and prompt investigation or intervention. Vital sign monitoring is particularly important in acute care settings, where patients are at higher risk and may require additional vigilance. Conventional contact-based devices, while widespread and generally reliable, can be inconvenient or disruptive to patients, families, and staff. Non-contact, video-based methods present a more flexible and information-dense alternative that may enable creative improvements to patient care. Still, these approaches are susceptible to several sources of bias and require rigorous clinical validation. A recent study by Jorge et al. demonstrates that video-based monitoring can reliably capture heart rate and respiratory rate and overcome many potential sources of bias in post-operative settings. This presents real-world evaluation of a practical, noninvasive, and continuous monitoring technology that had previously only been tested in controlled settings.