Over the last years, studies using artificial intelligence (AI) for the detection and prediction of diseases have increased and also concentrated more and more on vulnerable groups of individuals, such as infants. The release of ChatGPT demonstrated the potential of large language models (LLMs) and heralded a new era of AI with manifold application possibilities. However, the impact of this new technology on medical research cannot be fully estimated yet. In this work, we therefore aimed to summarise the most recent pre-ChatGPT developments in the field of automated detection and prediction of diseases and disease status in infants, i.e., within the first 12 months of life. For this, we systematically searched the scientific databases PubMed and IEEE Xplore for original articles published within the last five years preceding the release of ChatGPT (2018–2022). The search revealed 927 articles; a final number of 154 articles was included for review. First of all, we examined research activity over time. Then, we analysed the articles from 2022 for medical conditions, data types, tasks, AI approaches, and reported model performance. A clear trend of increasing research activity over time could be observed. The most recently published articles focused on medical conditions of twelve different ICD-11 categories; “certain conditions originating in the perinatal period” was the most frequently addressed disease category. AI models were trained with a variety of data types, among which clinical and demographic information and laboratory data were most frequently exploited. The most frequently performed tasks aimed to detect present diseases, followed by the prediction of diseases and disease status at a later point in development. Deep neural networks turned out as the most popular AI approach, even though traditional methods, such as random forests and support vector machines, still play a role—presumably due to their explainability or better suitability when the amount of data is limited. Finally, the reported performances in many of the reviewed articles suggest that AI has the potential to assist in diagnostic procedures for infants in the near future. LLMs will boost developments in this field in the upcoming years.
