Agentic AI represents a transformative shift in artificial intelligence, but its rapid advancement has led to a fragmented understanding, often conflating modern neural systems with outdated symbolic models—a practice known as conceptual retrofitting . This survey cuts through this confusion by introducing a novel dual-paradigm framework that categorizes agentic systems into two distinct lineages: the symbolic/classical (relying on algorithmic planning and persistent state) and the neural/generative (leveraging stochastic generation and prompt-driven orchestration). Through a systematic PRISMA-based review of 90 studies (2018–2025), we provide a comprehensive analysis structured around this framework across three dimensions: (1) the theoretical foundations and architectural principles defining each paradigm; (2) domain-specific implementations in healthcare, finance, and robotics, demonstrating how application constraints dictate paradigm selection; and (3) paradigm-specific ethical and governance challenges, revealing divergent risks and mitigation strategies. Our analysis reveals that the choice of paradigm is strategic: symbolic systems dominate safety-critical domains (e.g., healthcare), while neural systems prevail in adaptive, data-rich environments (e.g., finance). Furthermore, we identify critical research gaps, including a significant deficit in governance models for symbolic systems and a pressing need for hybrid neuro-symbolic architectures. The findings culminate in a strategic roadmap arguing that the future of Agentic AI lies not in the dominance of one paradigm, but in their intentional integration to create systems that are both adaptable and reliable . This work provides the essential conceptual toolkit to guide future research, development, and policy toward robust and trustworthy hybrid intelligent systems.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an infectious disease with first symptoms similar to the flu. COVID-19 appeared first in China and very quickly spreads to the rest of the world, causing then the 2019-20 coronavirus pandemic. In many cases, this disease causes pneumonia. Since pulmonary infections can be observed through radiography images, this paper investigates deep learning methods for automatically analyzing query chest X-ray images with the hope to bring precision tools to health professionals towards screening the COVID-19 and diagnosing confirmed patients. In this context, training datasets, deep learning architectures and analysis strategies have been experimented from publicly open sets of chest X-ray images. Tailored deep learning models are proposed to detect pneumonia infection cases, notably viral cases. It is assumed that viral pneumonia cases detected during an epidemic COVID-19 context have a high probability to presume COVID-19 infections. Moreover, easy-to-apply health indicators are proposed for estimating infection status and predicting patient status from the detected pneumonia cases. Experimental results show possibilities of training deep learning models over publicly open sets of chest X-ray images towards screening viral pneumonia. Chest X-ray test images of COVID-19 infected patients are successfully diagnosed through detection models retained for their performances. The efficiency of proposed health indicators is highlighted through simulated scenarios of patients presenting infections and health problems by combining real and synthetic health data.

Since the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic in late 2019, medical imaging has been widely used to analyze this disease. Indeed, CT-scans of the lungs can help diagnose, detect, and quantify Covid-19 infection. In this paper, we address the segmentation of Covid-19 infection from CT-scans. To improve the performance of the Att-Unet architecture and maximize the use of the Attention Gate, we propose the PAtt-Unet and DAtt-Unet architectures. PAtt-Unet aims to exploit the input pyramids to preserve the spatial awareness in all of the encoder layers. On the other hand, DAtt-Unet is designed to guide the segmentation of Covid-19 infection inside the lung lobes. We also propose to combine these two architectures into a single one, which we refer to as PDAtt-Unet. To overcome the blurry boundary pixels segmentation of Covid-19 infection, we propose a hybrid loss function. The proposed architectures were tested on four datasets with two evaluation scenarios (intra and cross datasets). Experimental results showed that both PAtt-Unet and DAtt-Unet improve the performance of Att-Unet in segmenting Covid-19 infections. Moreover, the combination architecture PDAtt-Unet led to further improvement. To Compare with other methods, three baseline segmentation architectures (Unet, Unet++, and Att-Unet) and three state-of-the-art architectures (InfNet, SCOATNet, and nCoVSegNet) were tested. The comparison showed the superiority of the proposed PDAtt-Unet trained with the proposed hybrid loss (PDEAtt-Unet) over all other methods. Moreover, PDEAtt-Unet is able to overcome various challenges in segmenting Covid-19 infections in four datasets and two evaluation scenarios.

Over the past two decades, several studies have paid great attention to biometric palmprint recognition. Recently, most methods in literature adopted deep learning due to their high recognition accuracy and the capability to adapt with different acquisition palmprint images. However, high-dimensional data with a large number of uncorrelated and redundant features remain a challenge due to computational complexity issues. Feature selection is a process of selecting a subset of relevant features, which aims to decrease the dimensionality, reduce the running time, and improve the accuracy. In this paper, we propose efficient unimodal and multimodal biometric systems based on deep learning and feature selection. Our approach called simplified PalmNet–Gabor concentrates on the improvement of the PalmNet for fast recognition of multispectral and contactless palmprint images. Therefore, we used Log-Gabor filters in the preprocessing to increase the contrast of palmprint features. Then, we reduced the number of features using feature selection and dimensionality reduction procedures. For the multimodal system, we fused modalities at the matching score level to improve system performance. The proposed method effectively improves the accuracy of the PalmNet and reduces the number of features as well the computational time. We validated the proposed method on four public palmprint databases, two multispectral databases, CASIA and PolyU, and two contactless databases, Tongji and PolyU 2D/3D. Experiments show that our approach achieves a high recognition rate while using a substantially lower number of features.