Michele Danilo Pierri 
Introduction On September 8, 2026, Circulation published the new American Heart Association scientific statement on infective endocarditis (IE) — the first comprehensive AHA document on the subject since 2015 [1]. Ten years is a long time in endocarditis. The patients have changed over that interval. Cardiovascular prostheses and transcatheter devices are now everywhere, molecular microbiology … Read more
Abstract Running a language model locally gives you a kind of control that hosted chatbots often hide. LM Studio, Ollama, llama.cpp, vLLM, and similar tools expose settings such as temperature, top_p, top_k, min_p, repeat_penalty, and context length. The problem is that their names say very little about what an ordinary user will actually notice on … Read more
More Expensive, Slower but Actually Better? Every frontier release arrives with the same implicit promise. Better reasoning, better reliability, better behaviour on the hard cases. Higher cost too, of course, which tends to be presented as the price of that improvement rather than as something anyone is expected to verify. When GPT-6 Astra became available … Read more
Mean heart rate is one of the most familiar numbers in medicine. Useful, immediate, and often enough for a first description. Yet every average carries the same defect: it compresses into a single value everything that happened over time. Two patients can share a mean of 70 beats per minute (bpm) and, across the same … Read more
A reproducible 300-question evaluation across medical exams, biomedical literature, multilingual question answering, and clinical calculation Meta released Muse Glimmer on 10 August 2026: thirty billion parameters, open weights, built for agentic work on consumer hardware.[1,2] I tested a quantized version five days later on a single NVIDIA RTX 3090 — partly because it was the … Read more
Vasoactive-Inotropic Score as a Worked Example Introduction: The Data Is There. The Variable Is Not. Every conversation about clinical AI opens on the same premise: hospitals are sitting on enormous quantities of data. True enough, and almost useless as a starting point. An electronic health record is a transactional system, built for documentation, for billing, … Read more
Narrative medicine transforms clinical practice through close reading and reflective writing. A comprehensive guide for physicians and researchers, from Rita Charon’s Columbia programme to Oliver Sacks, Tolstoy, and Jerome Groopman.
Hunting for the largest language model you can run on a personal computer has turned into a discipline of its own. Forums, repositories and social feeds circulate configurations that load models of 70, 120, even several hundred billion parameters, using consumer GPUs, generous amounts of system RAM and increasingly aggressive quantisation. The results are frequently … Read more
I went back to the Odyssey when Nolan’s film came out, for reasons that had nothing to do with medicine. I did not get far. Book I stopped me. Odysseus, we are told almost in passing, once sailed to Ephyra to find a man named Ilus, son of Mermerus, and to ask him for a … Read more
Deleting the patient name from a DICOM file feels like anonymization. It is not. A cardiac CT study I once pulled for a teaching file had a blank PatientName, a scrubbed PatientID, and a perfectly readable date of birth sitting three tags down in a private block the vendor never documented. The header looked clean. … Read more