Integrating Artificial Intelligence into the Arabic Medical Domain: A Review of Current Progress, Challenges, and Future Directions

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative force across multiple fields, especially in the healthcare domain, where it has demonstrated a promising success in improving diagnostic accuracy, clinical decision making, and cost-efficiency particularly within high-resource languages such as English. However, the use of AI in Arabic health care systems remains significantly underexplored. The Arabic language, with its complex morphology and wide dialectal variation, poses unique challenges that hinder the rapid development and deployment of AI-driven medical solutions. This paper offers a comprehensive narrative review of current progress, key challenges, proposed solution, and future directions for interested researchers in applying AI in this linguistically and culturally specific context. To adopt a rigorous academic criterion, we systematically reviewed only peer-reviewed articles published in high-impact journals and cited at least five times. The results indicate a growing interest in Arabic medical AI. However, significant obstacles remain, most notably, the severe lack of high-quality linguistic resources, including annotated corpora, domain-specific lexicons, tokenization, embedding approach toiled for arabic with its dialects only, and Arabic-centric medical natural language processing (NLP) libraries. Moreover, existing research has predominantly focused on outdated approaches. Despite the demonstrated potential of large language models (LLMs) in other languages, no studies to date have systematically assessed their capabilities within the Arabic medical context. This gap should serve as a catalyst for future research efforts aimed at advancing Arabic medical AI. Furthermore, strategic investment in the development of linguistic resources, computational tools, and robust evaluation frameworks is essential to unlock the full potential of AI for the Arabic language and to foster innovation in healthcare delivery across the Arab world.

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