This paper provides a systematic and in-depth examination of large language models (LLMs) in the healthcare domain, addressing their significant potential to transform medical practice through advanced natural language processing capabilities. Current implementations demonstrate LLMs’ promising applications across clinical decision support, medical education, diagnostics, and patient care, while highlighting critical challenges in privacy, ethical deployment, and factual accuracy that require resolution for responsible integration into healthcare systems. This paper provides a comprehensive understanding of the background of healthcare LLMs, the evolution and architectural foundation, and the multimodal capabilities. Key methodological aspects—such as domain-specific data acquisition, large-scale pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, prompt engineering, and in-context learning—are explored in the context of healthcare use cases. The paper highlights the trends and categorizes prominent application areas in medicine. Additionally, it critically examines the prevailing technical and social challenges of healthcare LLMs, including issues of model bias, interpretability, ethics, governance, fairness, equity, data privacy, and regulatory compliance. The survey concludes with an outlook on emerging research directions and strategic recommendations for the development and deployment of healthcare LLMs.

Invading pests and diseases always degrade the quality and quantity of plants. Early and accurate identification of plant diseases is critical for plant health and growth. This work proposes a smartphone-based solution using a Vision Transformer (ViT) model for identifying healthy plants and unhealthy plants with diseases. The collected dataset of tomato leaves was used to collectively train Vision Transformer and Inception V3-based deep learning (DL) models to differentiate healthy and diseased plants. These models detected 10 different tomato disease classes from the dataset containing 10,010 images. The performance of the two DL models was compared. This work also presents a smartphone-based application (Android App) using a ViT-based model, which works on the basis of the self-attention mechanism and yielded a better performance (90.99% testing) than Inception V3 in our experimentation. The proposed ViT-SmartAgri is promising and can be implemented on a colossal scale for smart agriculture, thus inspiring future work in this area.

Digital twins are a relatively new form of digital modeling that has been gaining popularity in recent years. This is in large part due to their ability to update in real time to their physical counterparts and connect across multiple devices. As a result, much interest has been directed towards using digital twins in the healthcare industry. Recent advancements in smart wearable technologies have allowed for the utilization of human digital twins in healthcare. Human digital twins can be generated using biometric data from the patient gathered from wearables. These data can then be used to enhance patient care through a variety of means, such as simulated clinical trials, disease prediction, and monitoring treatment progression remotely. This revolutionary method of patient care is still in its infancy, and as such, there is limited research on using wearables to generate human digital twins for healthcare applications. This paper reviews the literature pertaining to human digital twins, including methods, applications, and challenges. The paper also presents a conceptual method for creating human body digital twins using wearable sensors.

Physiological signals obtained from electroencephalography (EEG), electromyography (EMG), and electrocardiography (ECG) provide valuable clinical information but pose challenges for analysis due to their high-dimensional nature. Traditional machine learning techniques, relying on hand-crafted features from fixed analysis windows, can lead to the loss of discriminative information. Recent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for robust automated feature learning from raw physiological signals. However, standard CNN architectures require two-dimensional image data as input. This has motivated research into innovative signal-to-image (STI) transformation techniques to convert one-dimensional time series into images preserving spectral, spatial, and temporal characteristics. This paper reviews recent advances in strategies for physiological signal-to-image conversion and their applications using CNNs for automated processing tasks. A systematic analysis of EEG, EMG, and ECG signal transformation and CNN-based analysis techniques spanning diverse applications, including brain-computer interfaces, seizure detection, motor control, sleep stage classification, arrhythmia detection, and more, are presented. Key insights are synthesized regarding the relative merits of different transformation approaches, CNN model architectures, training procedures, and benchmark performance. Current challenges and promising research directions at the intersection of deep learning and physiological signal processing are discussed. This review aims to catalyze continued innovations in effective end-to-end systems for clinically relevant information extraction from multidimensional physiological data using convolutional neural networks by providing a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art techniques.

Diabetes, a significant global health crisis, is primarily driven in India by unhealthy diets and sedentary lifestyles, with rapid urbanization amplifying these effects through convenience-oriented living and limited physical activity opportunities, underscoring the need for advanced preventative strategies and technology for effective management. This study integrates Shapley Additive explanations (SHAPs) into ensemble machine learning models to improve the accuracy and efficiency of diabetes predictions. By identifying the most influential features using SHAP, this study examined their role in maintaining high predictive performance while minimizing computational demands. The impact of feature selection on model accuracy was assessed across ten models using three feature sets: all features, the top three influential features, and all except these top three. Models focusing on the top three features achieved superior performance, with the ensemble model attaining a better performance in most of the metrics, outperforming comparable approaches. Notably, excluding these features led to a significant decline in performance, reinforcing their critical influence. These findings validate the effectiveness of targeted feature selection for efficient and robust clinical applications.

Alzheimer’s disease is a weakening neurodegenerative condition with profound cognitive implications, making early and accurate detection crucial for effective treatment. In recent years, machine learning, particularly deep learning, has shown significant promise in detecting mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer’s disease conversion. This review synthesizes research on machine learning approaches for predicting conversion from mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer’s disease dementia using magnetic resonance imaging, positron emission tomography, and other biomarkers. Various techniques used in literature such as machine learning, deep learning, and transfer learning were examined in this study. Additionally, data modalities and feature extraction methods analyzed by different researchers are discussed. This review provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of research in Alzheimer’s disease detection and highlights future research directions.