Flexible organic near-infrared (NIR) sensors are gaining significant attention across various applications, particularly in clinical settings, where they hold the potential to significantly enhance human wellbeing. This review highlights recent advancements in flexible organic photodetectors (OPDs) and examines the opportunities and technical challenges in diverse fields such as environmental pollution monitoring, bioimaging, food testing, automotive applications, healthcare, artificial vision, wearable electronics, and optical communication.

Optical neural networks hold promise as future hardware for energy-efficient artificial intelligence tasks. The implementation of nonlinear functions in photonic integrated circuits is required for optical neural network design and performance calculation. A European scientific collaboration has experimentally demonstrated a novel optical nonlinearity arising from the hydrodynamic behavior of electrons in doped semiconductors. These results could enable advanced photonic integrated circuits using mature microfabrication processes, paving the way for scalable, high-performance optical computing.

Harnessing the artificial intelligence (AI) driven platform, IDentif.AI, researchers from the Institute for Digital Medicine (WisDM), Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS Medicine), Cancer Science Institute of Singapore, NUS and the Shu Chien-Gene Lay Department of Bioengineering at the University of California San Diego, sought to uncover sex-specific drug combinations that may slow or halt AVS progression. IDentif.AI optimised drug combinations to inhibit aortic valve myofibroblast activation—a hallmark of AVS which refers to a process causing valve cells to stiffen and scar—in female and male valve cells isolated from laboratory models. The AI platform pinpointed a list of female-biased combinations (e.g. Y-27632/SB-203580/SD-208) that were more effective in addressing AVS in female cells, while AI-optimised male-biased combinations (e.g.  LY294002/Irosustat/TM5441) were notably more effective in male cells.

Realizing the point-of-care tumor markers biodetection with good convenience and high sensitivity possesses great significance for prompting cancer monitoring and screening in biomedical study field. Herein, the quantum dots luminescence and microfluidic biochip with machine vision algorithm-based intelligent biosensing platform have been designed and manufactured for point-of-care tumor markers diagnostics. The employed quantum dots with excellent photoluminescent performance are modified with specific antibody as the optical labeling agents for the designed sandwich structure immunoassay. The corresponding biosensing investigations of the designed biodetection platform illustrate several advantages involving high sensitivity (~ 0.021 ng mL^-1), outstanding accessibility, and great integrability. Moreover, related test results of human-sourced artificial saliva samples demonstrate better detection capabilities compared with commercially utilized rapid test strips. Combining these infusive abilities, our elaborate biosensing platform is expected to exhibit potential applications for the future point-of-care tumor markers diagnostic area.