ChatGPT represents a transformative technology in healthcare, with demonstrated impacts across clinical practice, medical education, and research. Studies show significant efficiency gains, including 70% reduction in administrative time for discharge summaries and achievement of medical professional-level performance on standardized tests (60% accuracy on USMLE, 78.2% on PubMedQA). ChatGPT offers personalized learning platforms, automated scoring, and instant access to vast medical knowledge in medical education, addressing resource limitations and enhancing training efficiency. It streamlines clinical workflows by supporting triage processes, generating discharge summaries, and alleviating administrative burdens, allowing healthcare professionals to focus more on patient care. Additionally, ChatGPT facilitates remote monitoring and chronic disease management, providing personalized advice, medication reminders, and emotional support, thus bridging gaps between clinical visits. Its ability to process and synthesize vast amounts of data accelerates research workflows, aiding in literature reviews, hypothesis generation, and clinical trial designs. This paper aims to gather and analyze published studies involving ChatGPT, focusing on exploring its advantages and disadvantages within the healthcare context. To aid in understanding and progress, our analysis is organized into six key areas: (1) Information and Education, (2) Triage and Symptom Assessment, (3) Remote Monitoring and Support, (4) Mental Healthcare Assistance, (5) Research and Decision Support, and (6) Language Translation. Realizing ChatGPT’s full potential in healthcare requires addressing key limitations, such as its lack of clinical experience, inability to process visual data, and absence of emotional intelligence. Ethical, privacy, and regulatory challenges further complicate its integration. Future improvements should focus on enhancing accuracy, developing multimodal AI models, improving empathy through sentiment analysis, and safeguarding against artificial hallucination. While not a replacement for healthcare professionals, ChatGPT can serve as a powerful assistant, augmenting their expertise to improve efficiency, accessibility, and quality of care. This collaboration ensures responsible adoption of AI in transforming healthcare delivery. While ChatGPT demonstrates significant potential in healthcare transformation, systematic evaluation of its implementation across different healthcare settings reveals varying levels of evidence quality–from robust randomized trials in medical education to preliminary observational studies in clinical practice. This heterogeneity in evidence quality necessitates a structured approach to future research and implementation.

DeepSeek has introduced its recent model DeepSeek-R1, showing divergence from OpenAI’s ChatGPT, suggesting an open-source alternative to users. This paper analyzes the architecture of DeepSeek-R1, mainly adopting rule-based reinforcement learning (RL) without preliminary supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which has shown better efficiency. By integrating multi-stage training along with cold-start data usage before RL, the model can achieve meaningful performance in reasoning tasks along with reward modeling optimizing training process. DeepSeek shows its strength in technical, reasoning tasks, able to show its decision-making process through open source whereas ChatGPT shows its strength on general tasks and areas requiring creativeness. Despite the groundbreaking developments of both models, there is room for improvement in AI landscape and matters to be handled such as quality of data, black box problems, privacy management, and job displacement. This paper suggests the future of AI, expecting better performance in multi-modal tasks, enhancing its effectiveness in handling larger data sets, enabling users with improved AI landscapes and utility.

The COVID-19 pandemic is caused by the SARS CoV-2 virus and can lead to severe lung damage and hyperinflammation. In the context of COVID-19 infection, inflammation-induced degradation of the glycocalyx layer in endothelial cells has been demonstrated. Syndecan-1 (SDC-1) is an established parameter for measuring glycocalyx injury. This prospective, multicenter, observational, cross-sectional study analyzed SDC-1 levels in 24 convalescent patients that had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 with mild disease course without need of hospitalization. We included 13 age-matched healthy individuals and 10 age-matched hospitalized COVID-19 patients with acute mild disease course as controls. In convalescent COVID-19 patients, significantly elevated SDC-1 levels were detected after a median of 88 days after symptom onset compared to healthy controls, whereas no difference was found when compared to SDC-1 levels of hospitalized patients undergoing acute disease. This study is the first to demonstrate signs of endothelial damage in non-pre-diseased, convalescent COVID-19 patients after mild disease progression without hospitalization. The data are consistent with studies showing evidence of persistent endothelial damage after severe or critical disease progression. Further work to investigate endothelial damage in convalescent COVID-19 patients should follow.

Background: Restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic may lead to a significant decrease in physical activity, an increase in sedentary behavior, and thus also such things as screen time or a change in health behavior patterns. The survey aimed to compare levels of physical activity, screen time, hours spent sitting and sleeping time among Polish children aged 3–5 years of age before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: We identified 3000 respondents under five years of age, at Polish kindergartens. The questionnaire consists of 62 questions according to the recommendations of health behavior in school-aged children. The questionnaire was completed by the parents of these children. Results: Only 30.77% of children complied with WHO criteria before the pandemic. During the pandemic, the percentage of children meeting the recommendations for physical activity decreased even more. Children spent much more time in a sitting position before the restrictions. The children slept as recommended 10–13 h a day, and the pandemic caused an increase in sleep duration of 10–18%. Most children had a limited time allowed for the use of electronic devices already before the pandemic, but during the pandemic the results negatively decreased by 71.54%. Conclusions: The results clearly indicate decreased physical activity and increased screen time. It is also crucial to develop recommendations for prevention management strategies of sedentary lifestyles in the youngest group.

Background: The prone position (PP) is increasingly used in mechanically ventilated coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) patients. However, studies investigating the influence of the PP are currently lacking in these patients. This is the first study to investigate the influence of the PP on the oxygenation and decarboxylation in COVID-19 patients. Methods: A prospective bicentric study design was used, and in mechanically ventilated COVID-19 patients, PP was indicated from a partial pressure of oxygen in arterial blood (P_aO2)/fraction of inspired oxygen (F_IO2) ratio of <200. Patients were left prone for 16 h each. Pressure levels, F_IO2, were adjusted to ensure a P_aO2 greater than 60 mmHg. Blood gas analyses were performed before (baseline 0.5 h), during (1/2/5.5/9.5/13 h), and after being in the PP (1 h), the circulatory/ventilation parameters were continuously monitored, and lung compliance (LC) was roughly calculated. Responders were defined compared to the baseline value (P_aO2/F_IO2 ratio increase of ≥15%; partial pressure of carbon dioxide (P_aCO2) decrease of ≥2%). Results: 13 patients were included and 36 PP sessions were conducted. Overall, P_aO2/F_IO2 increased significantly in the PP (p < 0.001). Most P_aO2/F_IO2 responders (29/36 PP sessions, 77%) were identified 9.5 h after turning prone (14% slow responders), while most P_aCO2 responders (15/36 PP sessions, 42%) were identified 13 h after turning prone. A subgroup of patients (interval intubation to PP ≥3 days) showed less P_aO2/F_IO2 responders (16% vs. 77%). An increase in P_aCO2 and minute ventilation in the PP showed a significant negative correlation (p < 0.001). LC (median before the PP = 38 mL/cm H₂O; two patients with LC >80 mL/cm H₂O) showed a significant positive correlation with the 28 day survival of patients (p = 0.01). Conclusion: The PP significantly improves oxygenation in COVID-19 ARDS patients. The data suggest that they also benefit most from an early PP. A decrease in minute ventilation may result in fewer P_aCO2 responders. LC may be a predictive outcome parameter in COVID-19 patients. Trial registration: Retrospectively registered.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronovirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) is the cause of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Vaccination is considered the core approach to containing the pandemic. There is currently insufficient evidence on the efficacy of these vaccines in immunosuppressed inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) patients. The aim of this study was to investigate the humoral response in immunosuppressed IBD patients after COVID-19 mRNA vaccination. In this prospective study, IgG antibody levels (AB) against the SARS-CoV-2 receptor-binding domain (spike-protein) were quantitatively determined. For assessing the potential neutralizing capacity, a SARS-CoV-2 surrogate neutralization test (sVNT) was employed in IBD patients (n = 95) and healthy controls (n = 38). Sera were examined prior to the first/second vaccination and 3/6 months after second vaccination. Patients showed lower sVNT (%) and IgG-S (AU/mL) AB both before the second vaccination (sVNT p < 0.001; AB p < 0.001) and 3 (sVNT p = 0.002; AB p = 0.001) and 6 months (sVNT p = 0.062; AB p = 0.061) after the second vaccination. Although seroconversion rates (sVNT, IgG-S) did not differ between the two groups 3 months after second vaccination, a significant difference was seen 6 months after second vaccination (sVNT p = 0.045). Before and three months after the second vaccination, patients treated with anti-tumor necrosis factor (TNF) agents showed significantly lower AB than healthy subjects. In conclusion, an early booster shot vaccination should be discussed for IBD patients on anti-TNF therapy.