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

To provide a comprehensive analysis of the landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) applications in cardiac arrest (CA).

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.

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.

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.