## 2 Materials and Methods
### Selection and Screening of Documents
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c} \hline \hline
**Component** & **Inclusion Criteria** & **Exclusion Criteria** \\ \hline \multirow{8}{*}{P (population)} & Studies involving adults—15 years and above for prospective primary studies and all age groups for retrospective studies; the general population in SSA and KPs at higher risk of STIs in SSA, such as men who have sex with men, transgender people, sex workers, people who inject drugs, people in prisons and detention/incarcerated people, adolescent girls, young women, and PLHIW, Sub-Saharan African countries, the region, and its subregions. & Studies involving children—14 years and below for primary prospective studies; general populations or KPs outside of SSA; countries outside of Sub-Saharan Africa. \\ \hline \multirow{8}{*}{I (intervention)} & Studies examining the applications of AI technologies in diagnosing, treating, and managing STIs. Examples of AI technologies include ML, DL, Natural language processing (NLP), Neural networks (NN), linear regression, logistic regression, decision tree, Support vector machine (SVM) algorithm, naive Bayes algorithm, K-nearest neighbors (KNN) algorithm, K-means, random forest algorithm, dimensionality reduction algorithms, gradient boosting algorithm, AdaBoost algorithm, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), Federated Learning, BERT, Explainable AI and others. \\ \hline \multirow{8}{*}{C (comparison)} & Studies with or without a comparator group comparing different AI approaches; comparing AI approaches and traditional diagnostic methods and comparing AI approaches and standard of care. \\ \hline \multirow{2}{*}{O (outcome)} & Studies reporting outcomes related to diagnosing, treating, and managing STIs using AI technologies. & Studies reporting outcomes without using AI approaches. \\ \hline \multirow{8}{*}{S (Study Design/Characteristics)} & Studies that use AI approaches in randomized controlled trials; cohort studies; prospective cohorts; retrospective studies; time series studies; case-control studies; descriptive, analytical, and quasi-experimental studies were conducted in English from 2015 onwards and available in full text. & Studies with unclear methodologies; lacking trustworthiness, reliability, and validity of the research designs; clear biases; conducted using non-English and before 2015; not available in full text (abstract only), incomplete articles, and unpublished materials. \\ \hline \multirow{2}{*}{Subject matter} & Studies on the diagnosis, treatment, and management of STIs using AI technologies. & Studies not addressing the use or applications of AI in the diagnosis, treatment, and/or management of STIs. \\ \hline \multirow{2}{*}{Literature type} & Primary studies—journal articles, book chapters, theses and dissertations, conference presentations, grey literature, and unpublished studies. & All secondary studies—reviews, meta-analyses, editorials, and opinion discussions. \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: Inclusion and exclusion criteria. and age of participants. Secondary reviews, meta-analyses, incomplete articles, unpublished materials, and non-English records were excluded from the study. Furthermore, we excluded articles with unclear methodologies, lacking trustworthiness or reliability and validity of the research designs, and studies showing clear biases.