Beyond the chain of survival: a scoping review of artificial intelligence applications in cardiac arrest

Abstract

BACKGROUND: To provide a comprehensive analysis of the landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) applications in cardiac arrest (CA). METHODS: Comprehensive searches were conducted in PubMed, the Cochrane Library, Web of Science, and EMBASE from database inception through 10 June 2025. Studies that applied AI in both in-hospital cardiac arrest (IHCA) and out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) populations across the following domains were included: prediction of cardiac arrest occurrence, prognostication of CA outcomes, applications of large language models (LLMs), and evaluation of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and other AI-driven interventions related to CA. RESULTS: The scoping review included 114 studies, encompassing data from 9,574,462 patients in total. AI was most commonly applied to the prediction of CA (overall, n=40; IHCA, n=30; OHCA, n=4; and both, n=6), CPR-related decision support during CA (n=16), and post-arrest prognosis and rehabilitation outcomes (overall, n=38; OHCA, n=21; IHCA, n=3; and both, n=14). Additional application areas included LLM-based applications (n=8), emergency call handling (n=4), wearable device-based detection (n=3), heart rhythm identification (n=2), education (n=2), and extracorporeal cardiopulmonary resuscitation (ECPR) candidate identification (n=1). Across all application scenarios, the highest area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) value for pre-arrest CA prediction in IHCA patients was 0.998 using a multilayer perceptron (MLP) model, whereas the optimal AUROC for pre-arrest CA prediction in OHCA patients was 0.950 using extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) or random forest (RF) models. For CPR-related decision support during CA, the highest AUROC achieved was 0.990 with a convolutional neural network (CNN) model. In prognostic prediction, the optimal AUROC for IHCA patients was 0.960 using XGBoost, while for OHCA patients it reached 0.976 using an MLP model. CONCLUSION: This review shows that AI is most commonly used for the prediction of CA and CPR-related support, as well as post-arrest and rehabilitation outcomes. Future research directions include drug discovery, post-resuscitation management, neurorehabilitation, and clinical trial innovation. Further studies should prioritize multicenter clinical trials to evaluate AI models in real-world settings and validate their effectiveness across diverse patient populations. Overall, AI has significant potential to improve clinical practice, and its role in CA application is increasingly important.