Maarten Lansberg

Yongkai Liu, Helena Feng, Bin Jiang et al.

Predicting outcomes in acute ischemic stroke (AIS) guides clinical decision-making, patient counseling, and resource allocation. Clinical notes contain rich contextual information, but their unstructured nature limits their use in traditional predictive models. We developed and evaluated the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Outcome Prediction Engine (COPE), a reasoning-enhanced large language model framework, for predicting 90-day functional outcomes after AIS from unstructured clinical notes. This study included 464 AIS patients with discharge summaries and 90-day modified Rankin Scale (mRS) scores. COPE uses a two-step CoT framework based on sequential open-source LLaMA-3-8B models: the first generates clinical reasoning, and the second outputs an mRS prediction. We compared COPE with GPT-4.1, ClinicalBERT, a structured variable-based machine learning model (Clinical ML), and a single-step LLM without CoT. Performance was evaluated using mean absolute error (MAE), accuracy within +/-1 mRS point, and exact accuracy. COPE achieved an MAE of 1.01 (95% CI 0.92-1.11), +/-1 accuracy of 74.4% (69.9, 78.8%), and exact accuracy of 32.8% (28.0, 37.6%), comparable to GPT-4.1 and superior to ClinicalBERT [MAE 1.24 (1.13-1.36)], Clinical ML [1.28 (1.18-1.39)], and the single-step LLM [1.20 (1.09-1.33)]. Subgroup analyses showed consistent performance across sex and age, with slightly higher error among older patients, those undergoing thrombectomy, and those with longer summaries. These findings demonstrate that COPE, a lightweight, interpretable, and privacy-preserving open-source framework, provides an accurate and practical solution for outcome prediction from unstructured clinical text.

Edward Kim, Yuri Cho, Jose Eduardo E. Lima et al.

Digital health interventions increasingly deliver home exercise programs via sensor-equipped devices such as smartphones, enabling remote monitoring of adherence and performance. However, current software is usually authored before clinical encounters as libraries of modules for broad impairment categories. At the point of care, clinicians can only choose from these modules and adjust a few parameters (for example, duration or repetitions). As a result, individual limitations, goals, and environmental constraints are often not reflected, limiting personalization and benefit. We propose a paradigm in which large language models (LLMs) act as constrained translators that convert clinicians' exercise prescriptions into intervention software. Clinicians remain the decision makers: they design exercises during the encounter, tailored to each patient's impairments, goals, and environment, and the LLM generates matching software. We conducted a prospective single-arm feasibility study with 20 licensed physical and occupational therapists who created 40 individualized upper extremity programs for a standardized patient; 100% of prescriptions were translated into executable software, compared with 55% under a representative template-based digital health intervention (p < 0.01). LLM-generated software correctly delivered 99.7% of instructions and monitored performance with 88.4% accuracy (95% confidence interval, 0.843-0.915). Overall, 90% of therapists judged the system safe for patient interaction and 75% expressed willingness to adopt it in practice. To our knowledge, this is the first prospective evaluation of clinician-directed intervention software generation with an LLM in health care, demonstrating feasibility and motivating larger trials in real patient populations.