Topic: Artificial Intelligence in Gastrointestinal and Metabolic-Bariatric Surgery: From Intelligent Diagnosis to Personalized Surgical Care

Metabolic-bariatric diseases and gastrointestinal diseases represent major disease areas with high prevalence and substantial disease burdens in China. Their diagnosis and treatment often require multidisciplinary collaboration and long-term, comprehensive patient management. In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have been rapidly integrated into the clinical practice of these two fields, demonstrating considerable potential in disease screening and diagnosis, medical imaging and endoscopic analysis, risk prediction, surgical planning, intraoperative navigation, treatment decision-making, and postoperative management.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming gastroenterology and metabolic-bariatric surgery through advanced image analysis, intelligent surgical assistance, data-driven decision-making, and personalized patient care. The integration of AI with endoscopy, medical imaging, digital pathology, surgical video analysis, and multimodal clinical data provides new opportunities to improve diagnostic accuracy, optimize treatment strategies, and enhance surgical outcomes.

This Special Issue explores emerging applications of AI in gastrointestinal diseases and metabolic-bariatric surgery, including early cancer detection, inflammatory bowel disease assessment, precision oncology, surgical planning, robotic-assisted surgery, and postoperative management. Particular attention will be given to generative AI, large language models, multimodal foundation models, digital twins, and AI-enabled surgical technologies.

We welcome original research, reviews, perspectives, and methodological studies addressing clinical validation, real-world applications, model generalizability, interpretability, safety, and ethical considerations. By bringing together clinicians, surgeons, engineers, and AI researchers, this Special Issue aims to advance reliable and clinically applicable AI solutions that can support more precise diagnosis, personalized treatment, safer surgical practice, and improved long-term patient outcomes.