Lessons from preventable ICU-related coronial deaths: A large-language-model-assisted national analysis of adult cases in Australia (1997 to 2025)
Authors' conclusion
Communication failures were the most frequently coded failure domain in this publicly available corpus, and perioperative deaths carried the heaviest multi-modal burden.
Study context
- Population
- Adult ICU-related deaths in Australian coronial findings meeting a coroner-language criterion for explicit or potential preventability, 1997 to 2025of 1190 ICU-related cases
- Participants
- 563 participants
- Outcome
- Clinical presentations and failure modes of preventable ICU-related deaths
Methodological detailsdescriptive study, large-language-model-assisted, national, clinician validation, 8583 reports retrieved from coroners' court websites; two-stage large-language-model pipeline (Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview)
- Descriptive study
- Large-language-model-assisted
- National
- Clinician validation
- 8583 reports retrieved from coroners' court websites; two-stage large-language-model pipeline (Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview)
Main finding
As reported in the abstract
- Presentation: trauma
- 19.7%
- Presentation: perioperative or procedural
- 18.8%
- Failure mode: communication, handover and documentation
- 63.6%
- Failure mode: treatment, medication or device problems
- 50.6%
- Failure mode: diagnostic-process failure
- 49.4%
Observational data: associations, not effects.
Further findings
Case characteristics
- Median age (years)
- 52
- Male
- 59.5%
LLM-clinician agreement (fully crossed two-reviewer audit of 130 cases)
- Presentation κ
- 0.64
- Mean failure-mode κ
- 0.63
- Substantial agreement
Original publication
Lessons from preventable ICU-related coronial deaths: A large-language-model-assisted national analysis of adult cases in Australia (1997 to 2025). J Crit Care. Published 20 August 2026. doi:10.
Composed by AI from the published abstract and checked against it. How Briefs are made →