Understanding Comorbidities in Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome: Could a Viral Infection Unmask the Disorder?

Analysis of over 19 million US patient records reveals that individuals with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome face a significantly elevated risk of developing Long COVID, particularly when overlapping with autonomic or immune dysregulation, and suggests that viral infections may often unmask previously undiagnosed cases of the disorder.

Pearson, M. L., Laraway, B. J., Elias, E. R. + 2 more2026-02-17📄 health informatics

Sino-US-DrugQA: A Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Cross-Jurisdictional Pharmaceutical Regulation

This paper introduces Sino-US-DrugQA, a bilingual benchmark dataset of 11,871 questions derived from US and Chinese pharmaceutical regulations, which reveals that while current large language models perform well on monolingual regulatory queries, they face significant challenges in cross-jurisdictional comparative reasoning, necessitating expert oversight for high-stakes compliance applications.

Chen, Z., Fu, X., Lu, W.2026-02-17📄 health informatics

Combining phenotypic similarity and network propagation to improve performance and clinical consistency of rare disease diagnosis

This paper presents a computational pipeline that combines asymmetric semantic aggregation of patient phenotypes with network propagation to improve the accuracy and clinical consistency of rare disease diagnosis, outperforming existing methods in identifying correct diagnoses and generating coherent differential hypotheses.

Chahdil, M., Fabrizzi, C., Hanauer, M. + 4 more2026-02-17📄 health informatics

Linguistic Effects of Ambient AI on Clinical Documentation: A Matched Pre-Post Study

This matched pre-post study of over 6,000 clinical notes reveals that ambient AI documentation systems significantly alter the linguistic structure of History of Present Illness sections by increasing length, syntactic complexity, and coherence while reducing ambiguity, whereas effects on Assessment and Plan sections are minimal, highlighting the need to evaluate these tools beyond efficiency to consider their impact on communication, cognition, and downstream analytics.

Li, Y., Zhou, H., Blackley, S. + 8 more2026-02-17📄 health informatics

Sleep chart of biological aging 1 clocks in middle and late life

This study utilizes a comprehensive "Sleep Chart" across 23 biological aging clocks to demonstrate that both short (<6 hours) and long (>8 hours) sleep durations are associated with accelerated biological aging, increased systemic disease risk, and higher mortality, whereas optimal sleep duration (6.4–7.8 hours) supports healthy aging and longevity.

The MULTI Study,, O'Toole, C. K., Song, Z. + 24 more2026-02-16📄 health informatics

Representation Before Retrieval: Structured Patient Artifacts Reduce Hallucination in Clinical AI Systems

Contrary to the prevailing assumption that retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) mitigates hallucinations, this study demonstrates that RAG significantly increases unsupported claims in clinical AI, whereas converting heterogeneous patient data into structured, provenance-tracked artifacts offers a more effective approach to ensuring factual accuracy and safety.

Scanlin, J., Cuesta, A., Varsavsky, M.2026-02-16📄 health informatics

Disentangling physiological heterogeneity in retinal aging using a deep learning-based biological age framework

This study presents a deep learning framework based on a vision foundation model that not only accurately predicts retinal biological age from fundus images but also disentangles physiological heterogeneity by decomposing aging signals into normative and pathological components linked to systemic health factors like inflammation and hemodynamics.

Chu, R., Sun, A., Qu, J. + 1 more2026-02-16📄 health informatics

Development and validation of an algorithm to identify front-line clinicians using EHR audit log data

This study developed and validated a highly accurate, scalable algorithm using electronic health record audit logs to identify the primary frontline clinician for each patient day, demonstrating 91% agreement with manual chart review and enabling the analysis of care continuity patterns across a large inpatient cohort.

Baratta, L. R., Wang, J., Osweiler, B. W. + 4 more2026-02-16📄 health informatics