bims-aukdir Biomed News
on Automated knowledge discovery in diabetes research
Issue of 2026–09–13
eleven papers selected by
Mott Given



  1. Front Digit Health. 2026 ;8 1907804
       Purpose: Diabetic retinopathy (DR) remains the leading cause of blindness among working-age adults and requires regular screening to detect progression among the growing global diabetic population. This study evaluated the performance of AEYE-DS, an autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) system designed for high-throughput, point-of-care analysis of retinal images, in detecting more-than-mild diabetic retinopathy (mtmDR) during routine screening of patients with diabetes who had not previously been diagnosed with DR.
    Principal results: AEYE-DS was tested across three prospective clinical studies using two FDA-cleared non-mydriatic retinal cameras: the handheld Aurora and the desktop Topcon NW400. The algorithm autonomously analyzed retinal images and determined mtmDR presence. Diagnostic outcomes were compared to a reference standard based on the Early Treatment for Diabetic Retinopathy Study (ETDRS) severity grading performed by multi-expert review at an independent reading center. Sensitivity and specificity were 93% and 91% in AEYE-1 (95% CI: 83%-97% and 88%-94%), 92% and 94% in AEYE-2 (95% CI: 79%-97% and 90%-96%), and 93% and 89% in AEYE-3 (95% CI: 80%-97% and 85%-92%). Imageability was >99% in all studies. Intra-operator repeatability exceeded 99% for both devices. Between-operator reproducibility was 98% for the desktop camera and 95% for the handheld device, while between-device reproducibility reached 99% and 97%, respectively.
    Conclusions: AEYE-DS demonstrated high diagnostic accuracy, imageability, reliability, and reproducibility across different operators and devices in non-mydriatic settings. Findings support autonomous AI system use for scalable, point-of-care DR screening, potentially expanding access, streamlining workflows, and reducing the global burden of diabetic eye disease.
    Keywords:  DR screening; artificial intelligence; autonomous screening; clinical trials; diabetic retinopathy
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.3389/fdgth.2026.1907804
  2. Front Digit Health. 2026 ;8 1773356
       Background: Predictive machine learning models can support timely interventions for diabetes management. However, there is limited insight into stakeholder perspectives on their use in healthcare, which is important for alignment with expectations and in turn fostering adoption.
    Objective: This study aimed to identify stakeholder perspectives on the (1) scenarios of use, and (2) the values and attributes of two machine learning models predicting diabetic foot ulcers and amputations in diabetes care.
    Materials and Methods: Five diabetes patients, two healthcare workers and four experts involved in system integration aspects participated in semi-structured interviews. Three scenario components were presented to help participants articulate their needs and preferences. Attributes were inductively identified from interview data and directly linked to scenarios of use, with values analyzed based on the identified attributes.
    Results: We identified four scenarios of use namely (1) supporting healthcare workers' decision making, (2) supporting patient empowerment, (3) improving appointment planning based on risk, and (4) providing early warnings concerning acute risks. In addition, thirteen values were identified: supporting patient awareness, hybrid approach, detecting acute risks, collaboration between healthcare workers at different levels, unobtrusiveness, integration into existing systems, explainability, translating patient data from EHRS into clinically relevant insights, risk-based stratification of care, continuous development, interoperability, privacy, and regulatory compliance.
    Discussion: The insights of this study can guide the creation of a system that integrate machine learning models for the prediction of diabetic foot ulcers and amputations.
    Keywords:  diabetes; healthcare; interview study; machine learning; prediction models; value proposition
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.3389/fdgth.2026.1773356
  3. Front Artif Intell. 2026 ;9 1913611
      Early and accurate detection of diabetic retinopathy (DR) is essential to prevent irreversible vision loss; however, manual screening is labor-intensive and subject to inter-observer variability. To address these limitations, we propose ARTNet, an Adaptive channel-wise and Region-aware Transformer Network for automated DR classification and segmentation from retinal fundus images. ARTNet integrates three sub-network mechanisms. The Adaptive Channel-wise Feature Network (ACFNet) performs channel recalibration using dual pooling and shared multilayer perceptrons to enhance discriminative retinal representations while suppressing irrelevant responses. The Ophthalmic Region-Aware Attention Network (ORAANet) applies spatial attention to highlight clinically significant regions, including lesions and abnormal vasculature. The Retinal Patch Aggregation Encoder Network (RPAENet), built on multi-head self-attention, captures long-range dependencies and global retinal context for hierarchical feature modeling. Convolutional refinement and global average pooling enable robust five-class DR classification, while a class-balanced focal loss mitigates data imbalance and improves minority-class sensitivity. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of ARTNet over intermediate and state-of-the-art models. On the Diabetic Retinopathy Detection dataset, ARTNet achieves 96.45% accuracy, 96.85% precision, 96.34% recall, and 96.60% F1-score. The model is further validated on the APTOS-2019 Blindness Detection and IDRiD datasets. Classification performance is evaluated using image-level DR grading metrics, whereas lesion segmentation performance is evaluated using the pixel-level lesion annotations available only in the IDRiD dataset. Results show that dual attention with transformer-based global reasoning improves feature representation and classification reliability. Its efficiency and stability support real-time ophthalmic screening and a clinical decision system.
    Keywords:  attention mechanism; diabetic retinopathy; feature fusion; retinal lesion detection; retinal lesion segmentation
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2026.1913611
  4. Front Endocrinol (Lausanne). 2026 ;17 1966845
      [This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fendo.2026.1909594.].
    Keywords:  community-dwelling older adults; diabetic retinopathy screening adherence; logistic regression; machine learning; protection motivation theory; random forest
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.3389/fendo.2026.1966845
  5. BMJ Digit Health Ai. 2025 ;1(1): e000089
       Objective: To assess the performance of machine learning (ML) models in predicting gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) using electronic health record (EHR) data from the first antenatal visit, and determine whether incorporating previous pregnancies data improves performance.
    Methods and analysis: In this retrospective cohort study, ML models were developed to predict GDM using EHR data (n=27 561, GDM 11.6%). Four ML algorithms: Logistic Regression (LR), Random Forest (RF), XGBoost (XGB) and Explainable Boosting Machine (EBM) were trained with seven to nine top clinical predictors from the EHRs. Models were trained and evaluated in separate first-trimester (n=27 561), nulliparous (n=11 623) and multiparous and past-pregnancy (n=4005) cohorts. Discrimination was measured by the area under the receiver-operating characteristic curve (AUC, 95 % CI), and calibration was assessed by slope and intercept. Decision-curve analysis was performed for models.
    Results: First-trimester models achieved AUC 0.819 (95% CI 0.811-0.827, slope=1.010, intercept=0.013) with LR, similar to more complex models such as XGB (AUC 0.818, slope=1.004, intercept=0.007), EBM (AUC 0.817, slope=0.988, intercept=-0.017) and RF (AUC 0.817, slope=1.062, intercept=0.103). Among nulliparous women, there was little difference between LR (AUC 0.813) and XGB, EBM or RF (0.805-0.814). When past pregnancy features were added to first-trimester data in multiparous women, discrimination improved: EBM AUC 0.885 (95% CI 0.867 to 0.900; slope 0.994), RF 0.878, LR 0.874 and XGB 0.876. Models using data from past pregnancies only achieved good discrimination (AUC 0.860, 95% CI 0.839 to 0.879; slope=1.028).
    Conclusion: A small panel of clinically selected variables provides robust early-pregnancy GDM prediction (AUC ∼0.81) and even stronger performance (AUC ∼0.86-0.89) when past pregnancy information is incorporated in multiparous women. Past pregnancy data alone gives useful preconception risk estimates. These findings highlight the promise of early GDM risk identification in both nulliparous and multiparous populations; however, additional research, including external validation and clinical trials, is needed to determine the models' practical utility and effect on maternal and neonatal outcomes.
    Keywords:  Artificial intelligence; Decision Support Systems, Clinical; Electronic Health Records; Machine Learning; Medical Records
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjdhai-2025-000089
  6. J Vis Exp. 2026 Sep 08.
      Diabetes management faces a number of obstacles, such as fragmented healthcare data, privacy concerns, poor explainability, and the lack of personalized therapeutic guidance. This research work introduces FedMediFormer-XAI, a unified and proper framework that incorporates federated learning, multimodal transformers, diffusion-based data augmentation, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for drug recommendation, and Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) for diabetes intelligence. The system utilizes diverse healthcare data types, e.g., clinical records, population health indicators, continuous glucose monitoring data, retinal fundus images, wearable sensor measurements, and pharmacological information. To generate synthetic samples and address class imbalance, diffusion models are used, and multimodal transformer architectures are employed to learn relationships among very different data sources. Federated learning enables collaborative training of models in a privacy-preserving manner without sharing raw patient data. The GNN component captures patient-drug and drug-drug interactions for personalized drug recommendations. Explainability methods such as SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), attention visualization, Integrated Gradients, and counterfactual reasoning give transparent interpretations of prediction and recommendation results. In the representative implementation, the proposed framework achieved an accuracy of 94.2%, precision of 93.1%, recall of 92.8%, F1-score of 92.9%, Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of 0.88, and an Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC-ROC) of 0.96. The graph-based recommendation module achieved precision = 0.89, recall = 0.84, and Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG) = 0.91. The protocol provides a structured approach for integrating heterogeneous healthcare data using multimodal transformers, federated learning, diffusion-based augmentation, graph-based recommendation, and explainable artificial intelligence. The reported computational results demonstrate the framework's potential for diabetes prediction and personalized medication recommendation, while the federated design supports decentralized data handling. A prospective multicenter clinical evaluation is required to establish clinical utility, generalizability, and real-world applicability.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.3791/73113
  7. Front Endocrinol (Lausanne). 2026 ;17 1933878
       Background: The mechanisms underlying why some individuals with diabetes develop severe diabetic retinopathy (DR), whereas others remain free of retinal complications despite long-standing disease, remain incompletely understood. We aimed to identify systemic susceptibility and resilience signatures associated with severe DR using an extreme phenotype-derived machine learning framework.
    Methods: An extreme phenotype cohort was established comprising 712 individuals with diabetes mellitus, including 437 patients with proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR; susceptible phenotype) and 275 patients with diabetes duration ≥10 years without retinopathy (resilient phenotype). Clinical and biochemical variables were integrated to develop interpretable machine learning models. The optimal model was further interpreted using SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP). An independent community-based diabetic cohort (n=673) was used to evaluate the distribution of susceptibility signatures in real-world populations.
    Results: LASSO regression identified 21 phenotype-associated features for model development. Among the evaluated algorithms, LightGBM demonstrated the strongest ability to discriminate susceptible and resilient phenotypes, achieving an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.90 (95% CI, 0.84-0.95) in the internal validation cohort. SHAP analysis identified urinary albumin excretion rate (UAER), diabetes duration, serum creatinine, total protein, age, and hypertension duration as the dominant phenotype-defining features. Notably, UAER exhibited a pronounced nonlinear association with susceptibility scores, suggesting a close link between renal microvascular injury and vulnerability to severe DR. When applied to the community cohort, the susceptibility signature showed limited discrimination in the overall population (AUC = 0.54) but became progressively enriched among individuals with greater metabolic burden, reaching an AUC of 0.71 in participants with fasting blood glucose ≥9.0 mmol/L.
    Conclusion: Using an extreme phenotype-derived machine learning framework, we identified systemic susceptibility and resilience signatures associated with severe diabetic retinopathy. Renal dysfunction, albuminuria, glycemic burden, and disease duration emerged as key phenotype-defining characteristics. These signatures became increasingly enriched in metabolically stressed individuals, supporting the concept that severe diabetic retinopathy arises through the interaction between intrinsic biological susceptibility and cumulative metabolic exposure. This framework may provide new insights into disease heterogeneity and facilitate future precision risk stratification strategies in diabetic eye disease.
    Keywords:  LightGBM; SHAP; diabetic retinopathy; extreme phenotype; machine learning; resilience; susceptibility
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.3389/fendo.2026.1933878
  8. Shock. 2026 Sep 07.
       BACKGROUND: Patients with diabetes mellitus complicated by acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) are a high-risk subgroup, but population-specific models for in-hospital mortality remain limited. We aimed to develop and externally validate machine learning models using the 2023 New Global Definition of ARDS.
    METHODS: This cross-national, multicenter retrospective cohort study used MIMIC-IV version 3.1 and ICU data from six Chinese institutions. Adults with diabetes and ARDS who stayed in the ICU for more than 24 hours were included. Clinical variables first recorded within 24 hours after ICU admission were candidate predictors. LASSO regression with 10-fold cross-validation selected features. Seven machine learning models were compared. Performance was assessed using discrimination, calibration, Brier score, decision curve analysis, and SHAP.
    RESULTS: A total of 539 MIMIC-IV patients were divided into training and internal validation sets, and 478 patients from six Chinese centers formed the external cohort. In-hospital mortality was 16.9%, 16.7%, and 20.3%, respectively. Logistic Regression achieved the highest internal AUROC (0.900), with an AUPRC of 0.588, sensitivity of 0.889, specificity of 0.800, and Brier score of 0.093. In external validation, its AUROC was 0.757, AUPRC 0.368, and Brier score 0.150. Observed mortality increased across higher predicted-risk groups. SHAP identified HCO₃⁻, PaCO₂, age, temperature, SpO₂, red blood cell count, platelet count, and respiratory rate as key predictors.
    CONCLUSIONS: This study developed and externally validated machine learning models for in-hospital mortality prediction in patients with diabetes and ARDS. Logistic Regression showed potential as an interpretable early ICU risk-stratification tool.
    Keywords:  Acute respiratory distress syndrome1; diabetes mellitus2; external validation5; in-hospital mortality3; machine learning4; risk prediction6
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1097/SHK.0000000000002937
  9. BMJ Digit Health Ai. 2026 ;2(1): e000269
       Objective: Predictive algorithms trained from historical data and deployed in dynamic environments are at risk from data drift. Machine learning models using data collected by sensors making continuous measurements could be impacted by both changes in the device itself and their users, driving drift and impacting safety. To maintain predictive performance, algorithms must be continuously monitored and tuned to overcome fundamental changes to both input data (covariate shift) and the relationship with the output (concept drift). Here, we aim to understand how changes to user behaviour, physiology and sensors could impact the safety of models using automated sensor readings from continuous glucose monitors (CGM).
    Methods and analysis: In this paper, we investigate how data drift in a machine learning model trained to predict short-term risk from blood glucose control for individuals with type-1 diabetes. We simulate how changes in both user behaviour and accuracy of the sensor could lead to covariate shift and concept drift. For each scenario, we quantify the changes to input data (Jensen-Shannon divergence), the impact to model performance metrics and the explainability of the model (ie, shift in feature importance).
    Results: We demonstrate that using a combination of covariate shift detection, multiple performance metrics and feature importance offers a powerful methodology of identifying different types of drifts in sensor data. For blood glucose management, our scenarios focused on user behaviour (ie, changes to blood glucose dynamics and CGM use) and device/sensor noise and variability, finding more simplistic approaches to drift detection could incorrectly identify risk to model safety.
    Conclusion: Machine learning and AI can enhance clinical decision-making, but often lack the transparency required to ensure ongoing safety. Combining complementary monitoring techniques enables clearer identification of changes in data or model behaviour, helping determine when retraining or intervention is needed.
    Keywords:  Artificial intelligence; Data Science; Disease Management; Machine Learning; Preventive Medicine
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjdhai-2025-000269
  10. Zhonghua Yi Xue Za Zhi. 2026 Sep 08. 106(33): 3478-3491
    National Clinical Research Center for Endocrine and Metabolic Diseases (Changsha)
      Large language models are being introduced into diabetes care at an accelerating pace, but their knowledge accuracy, safety boundaries, explainability, and real-world usability remains uncertain. A diabetes-specific evaluation framework is urgently needed. To address this gap, the National Clinical Research Center for Endocrine and Metabolic Diseases (Changsha) and Chinese Society of Endocrinology and Metabolism, Chinese Medical Doctor Association convened experts in diabetology, artificial intelligence, clinical research, biostatistics, medical informatics, public health, and ethics. Based on a systematic literature review and two Delphi rounds, we developed the consensus for primary use in Chinese clinical settings. This consensus is primarily intended for clinical application in China, emphasizes that physicians retain ultimate responsibility for diagnosis and treatment, and proposes a three-tier evaluation framework covering dimensions, methods, and indicators across five domains: accuracy and reliability, safety, clinical utility and value, user experience and interactivity, ethics and compliance. It provides a practical basis for the development, validation, adoption, and continuous monitoring of large language models for diabetes care.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.3760/cma.j.cn112137-20260313-00702
  11. Clin Hypertens. 2026 ;32 e38
       Background: Cardiovascular risk stratification in patients with hypertension and diabetes remains suboptimal. We evaluated the prognostic and incremental value of Dr. Noon CVD, a deep learning (DL)-based retinal biomarker, for 10-year atherosclerotic cardiovascular (ASCVD) mortality.
    Methods: This retrospective, single-center, primary prevention cohort study included 7,832 Korean patients with hypertension or diabetes diagnosed on or before retinal fundus photography (2005 to 2022). Patients with prior cardiovascular disease were excluded. The primary outcome of 10-year ASCVD mortality and a sensitivity analysis of 5-year mortality were stratified using 4-tier and 3-tier Dr. Noon CVD systems, respectively. Multivariable Cox proportional hazards models were adjusted for traditional risk factors and chronic kidney disease (CKD), and incremental predictive value was assessed using the change in the C-index (ΔC-index) and net reclassification improvement (NRI).
    Results: In the overall population, the Dr. Noon CVD score was independently associated with 10-year ASCVD mortality (hazard ratio [HR] trend, 1.49; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.21 to 1.85; P < 0.001) after full adjustment for traditional factors and CKD. Adding Dr. Noon CVD to the clinical model significantly improved discrimination (ΔC-index, 0.030; P = 0.001) and risk reclassification (NRI, 0.484; 95% CI, 0.233 to 0.666; P < 0.001). This independent prognostic value was consistent in both hypertension (10-year HR trend, 1.48; P = 0.006) and diabetes (10-year HR trend, 1.42; P = 0.003) subgroups. The reclassification improvement was greater in the diabetes than the hypertension subgroup (10-year NRI, 0.481 vs. 0.413). The score's prognostic value was independent of diabetic retinopathy status.
    Conclusions: DL-based retinal imaging provides prognostic value for 10-year ASCVD mortality independent of the available clinical risk factors (age, sex, hypertension, diabetes, and CKD) and consistent under adjustment for available laboratory measures, supporting its role as an accessible opportunistic screening tool for long-term primary prevention in cardiometabolic clinics.
    Keywords:  Artificial intelligence; Cardiovascular diseases; Deep learning; Diabetes mellitus; Diagnostic imaging; Hypertension; Renal insufficiency, chronic; Retina; Risk assessment
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.5646/ch.2026.32.e38