Artificial Intelligence in Predictive Healthcare: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Background/Objectives: Today, Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) significantly enhance predictive analytics in the healthcare landscape, enabling timely and accurate predictions that lead to proactive interventions, personalized treatment plans, and ultimately improved patient care. As healthcare systems increasingly adopt data-driven approaches, the integration of AI and data analysis has garnered substantial interest, as reflected in the growing number of publications highlighting innovative applications of AI in clinical settings. This review synthesizes recent evidence on application areas, commonly used models, metrics, and challenges. Methods: We conducted a systematic literature review between using Web of Science and Google Scholar databases from 2021–2025 covering a diverse range of AI and ML techniques applied to disease prediction. Results: Twenty-two studies met criteria. The most frequently used machine learning approaches were tree-based ensemble models (e.g., Random Forest, XGBoost, LightGBM) for structured clinical data, and deep learning architectures (e.g., CNN, LSTM) for imaging and time-series tasks. Evaluation most commonly relied on AUROC, F1-score, accuracy, and sensitivity. key challenges remain regarding data privacy, integration with clinical workflows, model interpretability, and the necessity for high-quality representative datasets. Conclusions: Future research should focus on developing interpretable models that clinicians can understand and trust, implementing robust privacy-preserving techniques to safeguard patient data, and establishing standardized evaluation frameworks to effectively assess model performance.