Empathy is vital in healthcare, influencing patient care quality and outcomes. Understanding the factors that affect empathy levels among healthcare professionals is essential for improving healthcare delivery. This systematic review aims to identify and analyze the factors influencing empathy levels among healthcare professionals, including demographic and professional characteristics. We conducted a systematic search across multiple databases, yielding 979 studies. After removing 116 duplicates, 863 records were screened based on titles and abstracts. Following eligibility criteria, 140 articles were retrieved for full-text assessment, of which 129 were excluded. Ultimately, nine studies were included in the meta-analysis. Data were synthesized to evaluate associations between empathy levels and factors such as gender, marital status, age, educational level, and job characteristics. The meta-analysis revealed significant associations: females exhibited higher empathy levels compared to males [standardized mean difference (SMD): −0.18; 95% confidence interval (CI): −0.32 to −0.04], and married individuals showed greater empathy than unmarried individuals (SMD: −0.30; 95% CI: −0.43 to −0.16). Age did not significantly influence empathy levels (SMD: 0.13; 95% CI: −0.16 to 0.41). No significant differences were found in empathy scores between nurses and other healthcare professionals or between doctors and nurses. Gender and marital status are significant predictors of empathy levels among healthcare professionals, while age and specialty do not appear to significantly impact empathy. These findings highlight the need for targeted interventions to enhance empathetic practices in healthcare settings.

Accurate diagnosis of gastrointestinal (GI) diseases typically requires invasive procedures or imaging studies that pose the risk of various post-procedural complications or involve radiation exposure. Bowel sounds (BSs), though typically described during a GI-focused physical exam, are highly inaccurate and variable, with low clinical value in diagnosis. Interpretation of the acoustic characteristics of BSs, i.e., using a phonoenterogram (PEG), may aid in diagnosing various GI conditions non-invasively. Use of artificial intelligence (AI) and improvements in computational analysis can enhance the use of PEGs in different GI diseases and lead to a non-invasive, cost-effective diagnostic modality that has not been explored before. The purpose of this work was to develop an automated AI model, You Only Listen Once (YOLO), to detect prominent bowel sounds that can enable real-time analysis for future GI disease detection and diagnosis. A total of 110 2-minute PEGs sampled at 44.1 kHz were recorded using the Eko DUO^® stethoscope from eight healthy volunteers at two locations, namely, left upper quadrant (LUQ) and right lower quadrant (RLQ) after IRB approval. The datasets were annotated by trained physicians, categorizing BSs as prominent or obscure using version 1.7 of Label Studio Software^®. Each BS recording was split up into 375 ms segments with 200 ms overlap for real-time BS detection. Each segment was binned based on whether it contained a prominent BS, resulting in a dataset of 36,149 non-prominent segments and 6435 prominent segments. Our dataset was divided into training, validation, and test sets (60/20/20% split). A 1D-CNN augmented transformer was trained to classify these segments via the input of Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients. The developed AI model achieved area under the receiver operating curve (ROC) of 0.92, accuracy of 86.6%, precision of 86.85%, and recall of 86.08%. This shows that the 1D-CNN augmented transformer with Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients achieved creditable performance metrics, signifying the YOLO model’s capability to classify prominent bowel sounds that can be further analyzed for various GI diseases. This proof-of-concept study in healthy volunteers demonstrates that automated BS detection can pave the way for developing more intuitive and efficient AI-PEG devices that can be trained and utilized to diagnose various GI conditions. To ensure the robustness and generalizability of these findings, further investigations encompassing a broader cohort, inclusive of both healthy and disease states are needed.

Hypertension has been traditionally known to be highlighted by mean blood pressure; however, emerging evidence exhibits that blood pressure variability (BPV), including short-term, day-to-day, and visit-to-visit fluctuations can have an implication across multiple body systems. Elevated BPV reflects repetitive hemodynamic stress, affecting the physiologic hemostasis contributing to vascular injury and end organ damage. This narrative review is a compilation of recent evidence on the prognostic value of BPV, explained by pathophysiology, various devices with its measurement approaches, and, essentially, the clinical implication of BPV and the use of such devices utilizing artificial intelligence. A comprehensive literature search across PubMed, Cochrane Library, Scopus, and Web of Science were conducted, focusing on observational studies, cohorts, randomized trials, and meta-analyses. Higher BPV has been associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular mortality, stroke, coronary events, and heart failure, the progression of chronic kidney disease, cognitive decline, and preeclampsia, among other end organ damage, despite mean blood pressure. The various pathophysiologic mechanisms include autonomic dysregulation, arterial stiffness, endothelial dysfunction, circadian rhythm alteration, and systemic inflammation, which result in vascular remodeling and multisystem damage. Antihypertensive medications such as calcium channel blockers and renin–angiotensin–aldosterone system inhibitors seem to reduce BPV; randomized trials have not specifically investigated their BPV-reducing effects. The aim of this review is to highlight that BPV is a dynamic marker of multisystem risk, and question how various AI-based devices can aid continuous BPV monitoring and patient specific risk stratification.

Phonoenterography (PEG) offers a non-invasive and radiation-free technique to assess gastrointestinal activity through acoustic signal analysis. In this feasibility study, 110 high-resolution PEG recordings (44.1 kHz, 16-bit) were acquired from eight healthy individuals, yielding 6314 prominent bowel sound (PBS) segments through automated segmentation. Each event was characterized using a 279-feature acoustic profile comprising Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs), their first-order derivatives (Δ-MFCCs), and six global spectral parameters. After normalization and dimensionality reduction with PCA and UMAP (cosine distance, 35 neighbors, minimum distance = 0.01), five clustering strategies were evaluated. K-Means (k = 5) achieved the most favorable balance between cluster quality (silhouette = 0.60; Calinski–Harabasz = 19,165; Davies–Bouldin = 0.68) and interpretability, consistently identifying five acoustic patterns: single-burst, multiple-burst, harmonic, random-continuous, and multi-modal. Temporal modeling of clustered events further revealed distinct sequential dynamics, with Single-Burst events showing the longest dwell times, random continuous the shortest, and strong diagonal elements in the transition matrix confirming measurable state persistence. Frequent transitions between random continuous and multi-modal states suggested dynamic exchanges between transient and overlapping motility patterns. Together, these findings demonstrate that unsupervised PEG-based analysis can capture both acoustic variability and temporal organization of bowel sounds. This annotation-free approach provides a scalable framework for real-time gastrointestinal monitoring and holds potential for clinical translation in conditions such as postoperative ileus, bowel obstruction, irritable bowel syndrome, and inflammatory bowel disease.

Macrophage activating syndrome (MAS) is a potentially life-threatening condition falling under the spectrum of secondary hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis, in the backdrop of rheumatological conditions. In this case of a middle-aged man, we see how an initial Epstein Barr virus infection triggered a chain of events, which after serial monitoring of labs was promptly diagnosed as MAS and treated appropriately, resulting in overall clinical improvement of the patient.