Researchers have developed three new antibiotics from scorpion venom and habanero peppers to combat tuberculosis and other drug-resistant pathogens. Researchers from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) have identified new ways to combat tuberculosis and reduce bacterial resistance, developing three new antibiotics derived from scorpion venom and habanero peppers. A team led by Lourival Domingos Possani Postay, from the Institute of Biotechnology's Morelos campus, created two drugs that demonstrated efficacy against the bacterium, responsible for tuberculosis, as well as against, a microorganism that in hospital environments can cause various clinical complications, from skin infections to potentially fatal diseases such as pneumonia, meningitis, septicemia, and endocarditis. The antibiotics were derived from the venom of the scorpion, native to the state of Veracruz. The team was able to isolate two colorless molecules called benzoquinones--heterocyclic compounds that do not contain amino acids--from the arachnid's toxin.

This study explores the application of machine learning models, specifically a pretrained ResNet-50 model and a general SqueezeNet model, in diagnosing tuberculosis (TB) using chest X-ray images. TB, a persistent infectious disease affecting humanity for millennia, poses challenges in diagnosis, especially in resource-limited settings. Traditional methods, such as sputum smear microscopy and culture, are inefficient, prompting the exploration of advanced technologies like deep learning and computer vision. The study utilized a dataset from Kaggle, consisting of 4,200 chest X-rays, to develop and compare the performance of the two machine learning models. Preprocessing involved data splitting, augmentation, and resizing to enhance training efficiency. Evaluation metrics, including accuracy, precision, recall, and confusion matrix, were employed to assess model performance. Results showcase that the SqueezeNet achieved a loss of 32%, accuracy of 89%, precision of 98%, recall of 80%, and an F1 score of 87%. In contrast, the ResNet-50 model exhibited a loss of 54%, accuracy of 73%, precision of 88%, recall of 52%, and an F1 score of 65%. This study emphasizes the potential of machine learning in TB detection and possible implications for early identification and treatment initiation. The possibility of integrating such models into mobile devices expands their utility in areas lacking TB detection resources. However, despite promising results, the need for continued development of faster, smaller, and more accurate TB detection models remains crucial in contributing to the global efforts in combating TB.

Chronic diseases, including diabetes, hypertension, asthma, HIV-AIDS, epilepsy, and tuberculosis, necessitate rigorous adherence to medication to avert disease progression, manage symptoms, and decrease mortality rates. Adherence is frequently undermined by factors including patient behavior, caregiver support, elevated medical costs, and insufficient healthcare infrastructure. We propose AdCare-VLM, a specialized LLaVA-based multimodal large vision language model (LVLM) by introducing a unified visual latent space with pre-alignment to facilitate visual question answering (VQA) concerning medication adherence through patient videos. We employ a private dataset comprising 806 custom-annotated tuberculosis (TB) medication monitoring videos, which have been labeled by clinical experts, to fine-tune the model for adherence pattern detection. We present LLM-TB-VQA, a detailed medical adherence VQA dataset that encompasses positive, negative, and ambiguous adherence cases. Our method identifies correlations between visual features, such as the clear visibility of the patient's face, medication, water intake, and the act of ingestion, and their associated medical concepts in captions. This facilitates the integration of aligned visual-linguistic representations and improves multimodal interactions. Experimental results indicate that our method surpasses parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) enabled VLM models, such as LLaVA-V1.5 and Chat-UniVi, with absolute improvements ranging from 3.1% to 3.54% across pre-trained, regular, and low-rank adaptation (LoRA) configurations. Comprehensive ablation studies and attention map visualizations substantiate our approach, enhancing interpretability.

Tuberculosis remains a critical global health issue, particularly in resource-limited and remote areas. Early detection is vital for treatment, yet the lack of skilled radiologists underscores the need for artificial intelligence (AI)-driven screening tools. Developing reliable AI models is challenging due to the necessity for large, high-quality datasets, which are costly to obtain. To tackle this, we propose a teacher--student framework which enhances both disease and symptom detection on chest X-rays by integrating two supervised heads and a self-supervised head. Our model achieves an accuracy of 98.85% for distinguishing between COVID-19, tuberculosis, and normal cases, and a macro-F1 score of 90.09% for multilabel symptom detection, significantly outperforming baselines. The explainability assessments also show the model bases its predictions on relevant anatomical features, demonstrating promise for deployment in clinical screening and triage settings.

Positive selection drives the emergence of adaptive mutations in Mycobacterium tuberculosis, shaping drug resistance, transmissibility, and virulence. Phylogenetic trees capture evolutionary relationships among isolates and provide a natural framework for detecting such adaptive signals. We present a phylogeny-guided graph attention network (GAT) approach, introducing a method for converting SNP-annotated phylogenetic trees into graph structures suitable for neural network analysis. Using 500 M. tuberculosis isolates from four major lineages and 249 single-nucleotide variants (84 resistance-associated and 165 neutral) across 61 drug-resistance genes, we constructed graphs where nodes represented isolates and edges reflected phylogenetic distances. Edges between isolates separated by more than seven internal nodes were pruned to emphasise local evolutionary structure. Node features encoded SNP presence or absence, and the GAT architecture included two attention layers, a residual connection, global attention pooling, and a multilayer perceptron classifier. The model achieved an accuracy of 0.88 on a held-out test set and, when applied to 146 WHO-classified "uncertain" variants, identified 41 candidates with convergent emergence across multiple lineages, consistent with adaptive evolution. This work demonstrates the feasibility of transforming phylogenies into GNN-compatible structures and highlights attention-based models as effective tools for detecting positive selection, aiding genomic surveillance and variant prioritisation.

Large-scale tuberculosis (TB) screening is limited by the high cost and operational complexity of traditional diagnostics, creating a need for artificial-intelligence solutions. We propose DeepGB-TB, a non-invasive system that instantly assigns TB risk scores using only cough audio and basic demographic data. The model couples a lightweight one-dimensional convolutional neural network for audio processing with a gradient-boosted decision tree for tabular features. Its principal innovation is a Cross-Modal Bidirectional Cross-Attention module (CM-BCA) that iteratively exchanges salient cues between modalities, emulating the way clinicians integrate symptoms and risk factors. To meet the clinical priority of minimizing missed cases, we design a Tuberculosis Risk-Balanced Loss (TRBL) that places stronger penalties on false-negative predictions, thereby reducing high-risk misclassifications. DeepGB-TB is evaluated on a diverse dataset of 1,105 patients collected across seven countries, achieving an AUROC of 0.903 and an F1-score of 0.851, representing a new state of the art. Its computational efficiency enables real-time, offline inference directly on common mobile devices, making it ideal for low-resource settings. Importantly, the system produces clinically validated explanations that promote trust and adoption by frontline health workers. By coupling AI innovation with public-health requirements for speed, affordability, and reliability, DeepGB-TB offers a tool for advancing global TB control.

Tuberculosis (TB) is the leading cause of death from an infectious disease globally, with the highest burden in low- and middle-income countries. In these regions, limited healthcare access and high patient-to-provider ratios impede effective patient support, communication, and treatment completion. To bridge this gap, we propose integrating a specialized Large Language Model into an efficacious digital adherence technology to augment interactive communication with treatment supporters. This AI-powered approach, operating within a human-in-the-loop framework, aims to enhance patient engagement and improve TB treatment outcomes.

The lungs are the essential organs of respiration, and this system is significant in the carbon dioxide and exchange between oxygen that occurs in human life. However, several lung diseases, which include pneumonia, tuberculosis, COVID-19, and lung cancer, are serious healthiness challenges and demand early and precise diagnostics. The methodological study has proposed a new deep learning framework called NASNet-ViT, which effectively incorporates the convolution capability of NASNet with the global attention mechanism capability of Vision Transformer ViT. The proposed model will classify the lung conditions into five classes: Lung cancer, COVID-19, pneumonia, TB, and normal. A sophisticated multi-faceted preprocessing strategy called MixProcessing has been used to improve diagnostic accuracy. This preprocessing combines wavelet transform, adaptive histogram equalization, and morphological filtering techniques. The NASNet-ViT model performs at state of the art, achieving an accuracy of 98.9%, sensitivity of 0.99, an F1-score of 0.989, and specificity of 0.987, outperforming other state of the art architectures such as MixNet-LD, D-ResNet, MobileNet, and ResNet50. The model's efficiency is further emphasized by its compact size, 25.6 MB, and a low computational time of 12.4 seconds, hence suitable for real-time, clinically constrained environments. These results reflect the high-quality capability of NASNet-ViT in extracting meaningful features and recognizing various types of lung diseases with very high accuracy. This work contributes to medical image analysis by providing a robust and scalable solution for diagnostics in lung diseases.

Tuberculosis (TB) is a major global health challenge, and is compounded by co-morbidities such as HIV, diabetes, and anemia, which complicate treatment outcomes and contribute to heterogeneous patient responses. Traditional models of TB often overlook this heterogeneity by focusing on broad, pre-defined patient groups, thereby missing the nuanced effects of individual patient contexts. We propose moving beyond coarse subgroup analyses by using contextualized modeling, a multi-task learning approach that encodes patient context into personalized models of treatment effects, revealing patient-specific treatment benefits. Applied to the TB Portals dataset with multi-modal measurements for over 3,000 TB patients, our model reveals structured interactions between co-morbidities, treatments, and patient outcomes, identifying anemia, age of onset, and HIV as influential for treatment efficacy. By enhancing predictive accuracy in heterogeneous populations and providing patient-specific insights, contextualized models promise to enable new approaches to personalized treatment.

The same underlying technology powering massively popular generative AI models like from large tech firms like OpenAI is now being used to scan for early signs of lung disease. Google, one of the leaders in new AI models, is partnering with a healthcare startup that's analyzing vast datasets of coughs and sneezes to detect signs of tuberculous or other respiratory diseases before they get worse. It's one of numerous ways the quickly evolving technology is rapidly reshaping early detection of disease across the healthcare industry. What happens once that initial diagnosis is made, however, still requires quintessential human clinical expertise. Earlier this year, Google released details about a new healthcare self-supervised, deep-learning model they dubbed Health Acoustics Representation (HeAR).