Life Operators is proposed: task-bounded mappings that define three scientific roles: Perception operators infer task-relevant biological states from multimodal observations, Evolution operators propagate these states under natural or intervention-conditioned dynamics, and Generation operators map them to measurable signals.
Abstract
Medical AI is moving beyond recognition towards clinical dialogue and longitudinal prediction. Yet a central question remains: how would a patient's state change under intervention? Statistical models learn future observations, whereas mechanistic models describe selected processes. Neither provides a common framework for representing patient state, coupling scales or revising failed assumptions. We propose Life Operators: task-bounded mappings that define three scientific roles. Perception operators infer task-relevant biological states from multimodal observations, Evolution operators propagate these states under natural or intervention-conditioned dynamics, and Generation operators map them to measurable signals. Each role may be realised by equations, statistical models, neural networks or hybrids. Bridge operators connect components with different variables, scales and time steps. Selected operators and bridges form task-specific Operator Graphs containing the smallest set of states and mechanisms sufficient for a declared claim. This modular structure also makes scientific revision localisable. An AI co-scientist may propose changes to states, operators, bridges or graph structure, while independent evidence determines which variants are retained, restricted or retired. Over time, validated components could accumulate into broader multiscale models of the human body and provide a computational foundation for medical artificial superintelligence.
Continuous multimodal sensing now allows human physiology to be observed throughout daily life rather than only during occasional clinical visits. However, most health artificial intelligence systems are designed to recognize current states, estimate risks or analyse individual biomarkers. They do not directly model ho...
Chong-Yang Zhang, Rendong Wang, Hao Zheng et al.· 0 citations
Human health is a single underlying state that no measurement observes directly: diagnoses, blood tests, molecular profiles and images each capture one facet at separate times. Inferring health from such evidence requires a representation that integrates every modality and is carried forward and revised as observations...
Z. Wang, O. Zhang, J. Wang et al.· medRxiv· 0 citations
Mathematical biology has long relied on mechanistic models, including ordinary and partial differential equations, stochastic systems, and agent-based models, to study biological processes across scales. These approaches remain central because they provide structure, interpretability, and biological insight. However, m...
K. Rabiei, G. Rempała, R. Laubenbacher et al.· Bulletin of Mathematical Bio...· 1 citation
TIDE, a Treatment-Informed Dynamics Encoder, a diagonal continuous-time state space uses the true inter-observation interval as its integration step and lets the exogenous intervention channel modulate the decay eigenvalues, so an intervention alters the rate law rather than the level.
Juslin Franklin, Gopalakrishna Kanathur· Journal of Intelligent Decis...· 0 citations
Longitudinal clinical cohorts are multimodal, irregularly sampled and pervasively incomplete: in ADNI, positron emission tomography and cerebrospinal fluid assays are absent from roughly half of all visits. Linear state-space models handle irregular sampling gracefully but treat a missing modality by masking the input,...
M. R. Rahman, Mostafa A. Hammouda, Wolfgang Maass· 0 citations
Electronic health records provide irregular observations of latent patient states that evolve continuously over time. Recent autoregressive models condition on clinical histories to forecast future events as sequences of discrete observations. Conversely, multi-marginal flow matching provides a continuous-time formulat...
Silas Ruhrberg Estévez, Kara Liu, Christopher Chiu et al.· 0 citations