From body-data to narrative body: Reconfiguring the human body in medical discourse in the age of Artificial Intelligence

The rapid integration of artificial intelligence into biomedical research and clinical practice is transforming the ways in which the human body is conceptualized and represented in medical knowledge. Rather than functioning merely as descriptive tools, scientific vocabularies and research frameworks contribute to shaping epistemic models of the body. This study investigates how contemporary medical literature reproduces particular representations of the body in the context of digital medicine and artificial intelligence. Methodologically, the research combines bibliometric mapping with discourse analysis. A systematic search of the PubMed database identified 2,518 articles published between 1973 and 2025 that include references to the body and artificial intelligence. From these articles, 7,275 keywords were extracted and analysed, with 499 terms meeting the minimum occurrence threshold for co-occurrence mapping using VOSviewer. The bibliometric analysis reveals the centrality of technical concepts associated with computational modelling, including neural networks, image processing, and computational biology. Complementary discourse analysis of the articles indicates that the body is predominantly conceptualized as a biomechanical structure, an imaging object, a network of physiological sensors, or a dataset analysed through predictive algorithms. In contrast, experiential and narrative dimensions of embodiment appear significantly less visible within the dominant vocabulary of biomedical research. Based on these findings, the study proposes a conceptual model of the digital body, describing the transformation of the body from a clinically observed organism into a data-driven object embedded within technological infrastructures of monitoring, modelling, and prediction. The analysis suggests that while digital medicine expands the technological capacities of healthcare, it also risks narrowing the conceptual space in which the body is understood. In this context, the integration of perspectives from medical humanities becomes increasingly important for reconnecting biomedical innovation with the lived, ethical, and narrative dimensions of human embodiment.