Artificial intelligence (AI) presents new opportunities to advance value-based healthcare in orthopedic surgery through 3 potential mechanisms: agency, automation, and augmentation. AI may enhance patient agency through improved health literacy and remote monitoring while reducing costs through triage and reduction in specialist visits. In automation, AI optimizes operating room scheduling and streamlines administrative tasks, with documented cost savings and improved efficiency. For augmentation, AI has been shown to be accurate in diagnostic imaging interpretation and surgical planning, while enabling more precise outcome predictions and personalized treatment approaches. However, implementation faces substantial challenges, including resistance from healthcare professionals, technical barriers to data quality and privacy, and significant financial investments required for infrastructure. Success in healthcare AI integration requires careful attention to regulatory frameworks, data privacy, and clinical validation.

Recent advancements in multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced the automation of medical image analysis, particularly in generating radiology reports from chest X-rays (CXR). However, these models still suffer from hallucinations and clinically significant errors, limiting their reliability in real-world applications. In this study, we propose Look & Mark (L&M), a novel grounding fixation strategy that integrates radiologist eye fixations (Look) and bounding box annotations (Mark) into the LLM prompting framework. Unlike conventional fine-tuning, L&M leverages in-context learning to achieve substantial performance gains without retraining. When evaluated across multiple domain-specific and general-purpose models, L&M demonstrates significant gains, including a 1.2% improvement in overall metrics (A.AVG) for CXR-LLaVA compared to baseline prompting and a remarkable 9.2% boost for LLaVA-Med. General-purpose models also benefit from L&M combined with in-context learning, with LLaVA-OV achieving an 87.3% clinical average performance (C.AVG)-the highest among all models, even surpassing those explicitly trained for CXR report generation. Expert evaluations further confirm that L&M reduces clinically significant errors (by 0.43 average errors per report), such as false predictions and omissions, enhancing both accuracy and reliability. These findings highlight L&M's potential as a scalable and efficient solution for AI-assisted radiology, paving the way for improved diagnostic workflows in low-resource clinical settings.

Limited DXA access hinders osteoporosis screening. This proof-of-concept study proposes using widely available knee X-rays for opportunistic Bone Mineral Density (BMD) estimation via deep learning, emphasizing robust uncertainty quantification essential for clinical use. An EfficientNet model was trained on the OAI dataset to predict BMD from bilateral knee radiographs. Two Test-Time Augmentation (TTA) methods were compared: traditional averaging and a multi-sample approach. Crucially, Split Conformal Prediction was implemented to provide statistically rigorous, patient-specific prediction intervals with guaranteed coverage. Results showed a Pearson correlation of 0.68 (traditional TTA). While traditional TTA yielded better point predictions, the multi-sample approach produced slightly tighter confidence intervals (90%, 95%, 99%) while maintaining coverage. The framework appropriately expressed higher uncertainty for challenging cases. Although anatomical mismatch between knee X-rays and standard DXA limits immediate clinical use, this method establishes a foundation for trustworthy AI-assisted BMD screening using routine radiographs, potentially improving early osteoporosis detection.

In this work, we investigate the performance across multiple classification models to classify chest X-ray images into four categories of COVID-19, pneumonia, tuberculosis (TB), and normal cases. We leveraged transfer learning techniques with state-of-the-art pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) models. We fine-tuned these pre-trained architectures on a labeled medical x-ray images. The initial results are promising with high accuracy and strong performance in key classification metrics such as precision, recall, and F1 score. We applied Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) for model interpretability to provide visual explanations for classification decisions, improving trust and transparency in clinical applications.

This research aims to develop an advanced deep-learning framework for detecting respiratory diseases, including COVID-19, pneumonia, and tuberculosis (TB), using chest X-ray scans. A Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based system was developed to analyze medical images and extract key features from chest X-rays. The system leverages various DNN learning algorithms to study X-ray scan color, curve, and edge-based features. The Adam optimizer is employed to minimize error rates and enhance model training. A dataset of 1800 chest X-ray images, consisting of COVID-19, pneumonia, TB, and typical cases, was evaluated across multiple DNN models. The highest accuracy was achieved using the VGG19 model. The proposed system demonstrated an accuracy of 94.72%, with a sensitivity of 92.73%, a specificity of 96.68%, and an F1-score of 94.66%. The error rate was 5.28% when trained with 80% of the dataset and tested on 20%. The VGG19 model showed significant accuracy improvements of 32.69%, 36.65%, 42.16%, and 8.1% over AlexNet, GoogleNet, InceptionV3, and VGG16, respectively. The prediction time was also remarkably low, ranging between 3 and 5 seconds. The proposed deep learning model efficiently detects respiratory diseases, including COVID-19, pneumonia, and TB, within seconds. The method ensures high reliability and efficiency by optimizing feature extraction and maintaining system complexity, making it a valuable tool for clinicians in rapid disease diagnosis.

Recent vision-language foundation models deliver state-of-the-art results on natural image classification but falter on medical images due to pronounced domain shifts. At the same time, training a medical foundation model requires substantial resources, including extensive annotated data and high computational capacity. To bridge this gap with minimal overhead, we introduce MedBridge, a lightweight multimodal adaptation framework that re-purposes pretrained VLMs for accurate medical image diagnosis. MedBridge comprises three key components. First, a Focal Sampling module that extracts high-resolution local regions to capture subtle pathological features and compensate for the limited input resolution of general-purpose VLMs. Second, a Query Encoder (QEncoder) injects a small set of learnable queries that attend to the frozen feature maps of VLM, aligning them with medical semantics without retraining the entire backbone. Third, a Mixture of Experts mechanism, driven by learnable queries, harnesses the complementary strength of diverse VLMs to maximize diagnostic performance. We evaluate MedBridge on five medical imaging benchmarks across three key adaptation tasks, demonstrating its superior performance in both cross-domain and in-domain adaptation settings, even under varying levels of training data availability. Notably, MedBridge achieved over 6-15% improvement in AUC compared to state-of-the-art VLM adaptation methods in multi-label thoracic disease diagnosis, underscoring its effectiveness in leveraging foundation models for accurate and data-efficient medical diagnosis. Our code is available at https://github.com/ai-med/MedBridge.

The automated generation of radiology reports from chest X-ray images holds significant promise in enhancing diagnostic workflows while preserving patient privacy. Traditional centralized approaches often require sensitive data transfer, posing privacy concerns. To address this, the study proposes a Multimodal Federated Learning framework for chest X-ray report generation using the IU-Xray dataset. The system utilizes a Vision Transformer (ViT) as the encoder and GPT-2 as the report generator, enabling decentralized training without sharing raw data. Three Federated Learning (FL) aggregation strategies: FedAvg, Krum Aggregation and a novel Loss-aware Federated Averaging (L-FedAvg) were evaluated. Among these, Krum Aggregation demonstrated superior performance across lexical and semantic evaluation metrics such as ROUGE, BLEU, BERTScore and RaTEScore. The results show that FL can match or surpass centralized models in generating clinically relevant and semantically rich radiology reports. This lightweight and privacy-preserving framework paves the way for collaborative medical AI development without compromising data confidentiality.

Planning an osteotomy or arthroplasty surgery on a lower limb requires prior classification/identification of its deformities. The detection of skeletal landmarks and the calculation of angles required to identify the deformities are traditionally done manually, with measurement accuracy relying considerably on the experience of the individual doing the measurements. We propose a novel, image pyramid-based approach to skeletal landmark detection. The proposed approach uses a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that receives the raw X-ray image as input and produces the coordinates of the landmarks. The landmark estimations are modified iteratively via the error feedback method to come closer to the target. Our clinically produced full-leg X-Rays dataset is made publically available and used to train and test the network. Angular quantities are calculated based on detected landmarks. Angles are then classified as lower than normal, normal or higher than normal according to predefined ranges for a normal condition. The performance of our approach is evaluated at several levels: landmark coordinates accuracy, angles' measurement accuracy, and classification accuracy. The average absolute error (difference between automatically and manually determined coordinates) for landmarks was 0.79 ± 0.57 mm on test data, and the average absolute error (difference between automatically and manually calculated angles) for angles was 0.45 ± 0.42°. Results from multiple case studies involving high-resolution images show that the proposed approach outperforms previous deep learning-based approaches in terms of accuracy and computational cost. It also enables the automatic detection of the lower limb misalignments in full-leg x-ray images.

Distal radius fractures (DRFs) represent up to 20% of the fractures in the emergency department. Delays to surgery of more than 14 days are associated with poorer functional outcomes and increased health care utilization/costs. At our institution, the average time to surgery is more than 19 days because of the separation of surgical and nonsurgical care pathways and a lengthy referral process. To address this challenge, we aimed to create a convolutional neural network (CNN) capable of automating DRF x-ray analysis and triaging. We hypothesize that this model will accurately predict whether an acute isolated DRF fracture in a patient under the age of 60 years will be treated surgically or nonsurgically at our institution based on the radiographic input. We included 163 patients under the age of 60 years who presented to the emergency department between 2018 and 2023 with an acute isolated DRF and who were referred for clinical follow-up. Radiographs taken within 4 weeks of injury were collected in posterior-anterior and lateral views and then preprocessed for model training. The surgeons' decision to treat surgically or nonsurgically at our institution was the reference standard for assessing the model prediction accuracy. We included 723 radiographic posterior-anterior and lateral pairs (385 surgical and 338 nonsurgical) for model training. The best-performing model (seven CNN layers, one fully connected layer, an image input size of 256 × 256 pixels, and a 1.5× weighting for volarly displaced fractures) achieved 88% accuracy and 100% sensitivity. Values for true positive (100%), true negative (72.7%), false positive (27.3%), and false negative (0%) were calculated. After training based on institution-specific indications, a CNN-based algorithm can predict with 88% accuracy whether treatment of an acute isolated DRF in a patient under the age of 60 years will be treated surgically or nonsurgically. By promptly identifying patients who would benefit from expedited surgical treatment pathways, this model can reduce times for referral.

A major global health and wellness issue causing major health problems and death, pneumonia underlines the need of quickly and precisely identifying and treating it. Though imaging technology has advanced, radiologists manual reading of chest X-rays still constitutes the basic method for pneumonia detection, which causes delays in both treatment and medical diagnosis. This study proposes a pneumonia detection method to automate the process using deep learning techniques. The concept employs a bespoke convolutional neural network (CNN) trained on different pneumonia-positive and pneumonia-negative cases from several healthcare providers. Various pre-processing steps were done on the chest radiographs to increase integrity and efficiency before teaching the design. Based on the comparison study with VGG19, ResNet50, InceptionV3, DenseNet201, and MobileNetV3, our bespoke CNN model was discovered to be the most efficient in balancing accuracy, recall, and parameter complexity. It shows 96.5% accuracy and 96.6% F1 score. This study contributes to the expansion of an automated, paired with a reliable, pneumonia finding system, which could improve personal outcomes and increase healthcare efficiency. The full project is available at here.