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Special Issue:
OJEMB Special Issue on “Neurosymbolic Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare: A New Paradigm for Trustworthy and Knowledge-Integrated Medical AI”
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a key enabler of innovation in healthcare, supporting applications ranging from medical imaging and disease diagnosis to personalized medicine and clinical decision support. Despite their remarkable success, purely data-driven approaches, particularly deep learning models, often suffer from limited interpretability, poor robustness under distribution shifts, and difficulties in incorporating clinical knowledge, regulatory constraints, and domain expertise. These limitations pose significant challenges to the safe and trustworthy deployment of AI systems in real-world healthcare environments.
Neurosymbolic Artificial Intelligence (NeSy AI) has recently emerged as a promising paradigm that combines the learning capabilities of neural networks with the reasoning power of symbolic systems. By integrating machine learning, knowledge representation, ontologies, knowledge graphs, and rule-based inference mechanisms, neurosymbolic approaches enable the development of AI systems that are not only accurate but also explainable, verifiable, and aligned with clinical knowledge and biomedical principles.
This Special Issue aims to provide a dedicated forum for researchers, clinicians, biomedical engineers, and industry practitioners working at the intersection of AI and healthcare to present novel theories, methodologies, frameworks, and applications of neurosymbolic AI in medicine and biology. The issue is motivated by the growing demand for trustworthy and knowledge-integrated AI systems capable of supporting critical healthcare decisions while ensuring transparency, safety, and regulatory compliance.
The Special Issue is associated with the 1st Symposium on Neurosymbolic Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare (NeSy4H 2026), to be held in Naples, Italy, on September 24–25, 2026. In addition to selected extended versions of high-quality symposium contributions, the Special Issue will welcome submissions through an open call from the broader research community.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
Neurosymbolic AI for healthcare and clinical decision support
Explainable, trustworthy, and verifiable medical AI
Knowledge representation, ontologies, and knowledge graphs in medicine
Hybrid neural-symbolic models for medical imaging and multimodal health data
Knowledge-enhanced machine learning and foundation models
Human-centered AI for clinical environments
Safety, robustness, and AI under data scarcity and distribution shifts
Biomedical informatics, personalized medicine, and digital health
Real-world clinical applications and translational studies
Ethical, regulatory, and compliance-aware healthcare AI
Guest Editors:
Giuseppe De Pietro, Pegaso University, Italy, giuseppe.depietro@unipegaso.it
Antonino Ferraro, Pegaso University, Italy, antonino.ferraro@unipegaso.it
Martina Iammarino, Pegaso University, Italy, martina.iammarino@unipegaso.it
Fabiano Pecorelli, Pegaso University, Italy, fabiano.pecorelli@unipegaso.it
Key Dates
Deadline for Submission: 31 Dic, 2026
First Reviews Due: 05 Mar, 2027
Revised Manuscript Due: 01 Apr, 2027
Final Decision: 01 May, 2027
Further details here:
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