Here's what you need to know, from why the cruise ship outbreak won't spark the next pandemic to how hantavirus spreads. Now that more than 100 passengers aboard a hantavirus -stricken luxury cruise ship have been evacuated, with 18 Americans in biocontainment units in Nebraska and Georgia, health officials around the world are working to monitor more than two dozen individuals who left the cruise and anyone with whom they might have come in close contact. So far, all of the 11 reported hantavirus cases are among passengers or crew on the ship, the World Health Organization's director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press conference in Madrid on Tuesday. That includes three deaths resulting from the virus. Typically, hantaviruses are spread when contaminated rodent droppings and urine are stirred up in the air and breathed in.

Abstract--Sepsis is a leading cause of mortality in intensive care units (ICUs), yet existing research often relies on outdated datasets, non-reproducible preprocessing pipelines, and limited coverage of clinical interventions. We introduce MIMIC-Sepsis, a curated cohort and benchmark framework derived from the MIMIC-IV database, designed to support reproducible modeling of sepsis trajectories. Our cohort includes 35,239 ICU patients with time-aligned clinical variables and standardized treatment data, including vasopressors, fluids, mechanical ventilation and antibiotics. We describe a transparent preprocess-ing pipeline--based on Sepsis-3 criteria, structured imputation strategies, and treatment inclusion--and release it alongside benchmark tasks focused on early mortality prediction, length-of-stay estimation, and shock onset classification. Empirical results demonstrate that incorporating treatment variables substantially improves model performance, particularly for Transformer-based architectures. MIMIC-Sepsis serves as a robust platform for evaluating predictive and sequential models in critical care research. Sepsis is a life-threatening condition caused by the body's extreme response to an infection that can lead to organ failure and even death.

Background. Dengue outbreaks are a major public health issue, with Brazil reporting 71% of global cases in 2024. Purpose. This study aims to describe the profile of severe dengue patients admitted to Brazilian Intensive Care units (ICUs) (2012-2024), assess trends over time, describe new onset complications while in ICU and determine the risk factors at admission to develop complications during ICU stay. Methods. We performed a prospective study of dengue patients from 253 ICUs across 56 hospitals. We used descriptive statistics to describe the dengue ICU population, logistic regression to identify risk factors for complications during the ICU stay, and a machine learning framework to predict the risk of evolving to complications. Visualisations were generated using ISARIC VERTEX. Results. Of 11,047 admissions, 1,117 admissions (10.1%) evolved to complications, including non-invasive (437 admissions) and invasive ventilation (166), vasopressor (364), blood transfusion (353) and renal replacement therapy (103). Age>80 (OR: 3.10, 95% CI: 2.02-4.92), chronic kidney disease (OR: 2.94, 2.22-3.89), liver cirrhosis (OR: 3.65, 1.82-7.04), low platelets (<50,000 cells/mm3; OR: OR: 2.25, 1.89-2.68), and high leukocytes (>7,000 cells/mm3; OR: 2.47, 2.02-3.03) were significant risk factors for complications. A machine learning tool for predicting complications was proposed, showing accurate discrimination and calibration. Conclusion. We described a large cohort of dengue patients admitted to ICUs and identified key risk factors for severe dengue complications, such as advanced age, presence of comorbidities, higher level of leukocytes and lower level of platelets. The proposed prediction tool can be used for early identification and targeted interventions to improve outcomes in dengue-endemic regions.

A recent, hours-long fire at a data center used by Elon Musk's X may have begun after an electrical or mechanical issue in a power system, according to an official fire investigation. WIRED was the first to report on the blaze, which occurred on May 22 in Hillsboro, Oregon. Data center giant Digital Realty operates the 13-acre site, and multiple people familiar with the matter previously told WIRED that the Musk-run social platform X has servers there. Data center fires are rare, with about two dozen well-known incidents over the past decade across thousands of facilities globally, according to various researchers. But growing demand for generative AI technology--which relies on large clusters of advanced computers--is stretching the size and power needs of data centers.

Identifying and measuring biases associated with sensitive attributes is a crucial consideration in healthcare to prevent treatment disparities. One prominent issue is inaccurate pulse oximeter readings, which tend to overestimate oxygen saturation for dark-skinned patients and misrepresent supplemental oxygen needs. Most existing research has revealed statistical disparities linking device errors to patient outcomes in intensive care units (ICUs) without causal formalization. In contrast, this study causally investigates how racial discrepancies in oximetry measurements affect invasive ventilation in ICU settings. We employ a causal inference-based approach using path-specific effects to isolate the impact of bias by race on clinical decision-making. To estimate these effects, we leverage a doubly robust estimator, propose its self-normalized variant for improved sample efficiency, and provide novel finite-sample guarantees. Our methodology is validated on semi-synthetic data and applied to two large real-world health datasets: MIMIC-IV and eICU. Contrary to prior work, our analysis reveals minimal impact of racial discrepancies on invasive ventilation rates. However, path-specific effects mediated by oxygen saturation disparity are more pronounced on ventilation duration, and the severity differs by dataset. Our work provides a novel and practical pipeline for investigating potential disparities in the ICU and, more crucially, highlights the necessity of causal methods to robustly assess fairness in decision-making.

The increasing demand for healthcare workers, driven by aging populations and labor shortages, presents a significant challenge for hospitals. Humanoid robots have the potential to alleviate these pressures by leveraging their human-like dexterity and adaptability to assist in medical procedures. This work conducted an exploratory study on the feasibility of humanoid robots performing direct clinical tasks through teleoperation. A bimanual teleoperation system was developed for the Unitree G1 Humanoid Robot, integrating high-fidelity pose tracking, custom grasping configurations, and an impedance controller to safely and precisely manipulate medical tools. The system is evaluated in seven diverse medical procedures, including physical examinations, emergency interventions, and precision needle tasks. Our results demonstrate that humanoid robots can successfully replicate critical aspects of human medical assessments and interventions, with promising quantitative performance in ventilation and ultrasound-guided tasks. However, challenges remain, including limitations in force output for procedures requiring high strength and sensor sensitivity issues affecting clinical accuracy. This study highlights the potential and current limitations of humanoid robots in hospital settings and lays the groundwork for future research on robotic healthcare integration.

Patient-ventilator asynchrony (PVA) is a common and critical issue during mechanical ventilation, affecting up to 85% of patients. PVA can result in clinical complications such as discomfort, sleep disruption, and potentially more severe conditions like ventilator-induced lung injury and diaphragm dysfunction. Traditional PVA management, which relies on manual adjustments by healthcare providers, is often inadequate due to delays and errors. While various computational methods, including rule-based, statistical, and deep learning approaches, have been developed to detect PVA events, they face challenges related to dataset imbalances and lack of interpretability. In this work, we propose a shapelet-based approach SHIP for PVA detection, utilizing shapelets -- discriminative subsequences in time-series data -- to enhance detection accuracy and interpretability. Our method addresses dataset imbalances through shapelet-based data augmentation and constructs a shapelet pool to transform the dataset for more effective classification. The combined shapelet and statistical features are then used in a classifier to identify PVA events. Experimental results on medical datasets show that SHIP significantly improves PVA detection while providing interpretable insights into model decisions.

The issue of failed weaning is a critical concern in the intensive care unit (ICU) setting. This scenario occurs when a patient experiences difficulty maintaining spontaneous breathing and ensuring a patent airway within the first 48 hours after the withdrawal of mechanical ventilation. Approximately 20 of ICU patients experience this phenomenon, which has severe repercussions on their health. It also has a substantial impact on clinical evolution and mortality, which can increase by 25 to 50. To address this issue, we propose a medical support system that uses a convolutional neural network (CNN) to assess a patients suitability for disconnection from a mechanical ventilator after a spontaneous breathing test (SBT). During SBT, respiratory flow and electrocardiographic activity were recorded and after processed using time-frequency analysis (TFA) techniques. Two CNN architectures were evaluated in this study: one based on ResNet50, with parameters tuned using a Bayesian optimization algorithm, and another CNN designed from scratch, with its structure also adapted using a Bayesian optimization algorithm. The WEANDB database was used to train and evaluate both models. The results showed remarkable performance, with an average accuracy 98 when using CNN from scratch. This model has significant implications for the ICU because it provides a reliable tool to enhance patient care by assisting clinicians in making timely and accurate decisions regarding weaning. This can potentially reduce the adverse outcomes associated with failed weaning events.