Diabetes patients could monitor glucose with lightwaves. Future versions of the noninvasive prototype may be as small as a watch. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A new, noninvasive blood-glucose monitoring system may allow people with diabetes to finally ditch their painful finger pricks and under the skin sensors. Although the current iteration is comparatively bulky, MIT scientists writing in the journal say they are well on their way to scaling down their invention.

-- Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) affects millions worldwide, requiring continuous monitoring to prevent severe hypo-and hyperglycemic events. While continuous glucose monitoring has improved blood glucose management, deploying predictive models on wearable devices remains challenging due to computational and memory constraints. T o address this, we propose a novel Lightweight Sequential Transformer model designed for blood glucose prediction in T1D. The model is optimized for deployment on resource-constrained edge devices and incorporates a balanced loss function to handle the inherent data imbalance in hypo-and hyperglycemic events. Experiments on two benchmark datasets, OhioT1DM and DiaTrend, demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in predicting glucose levels and detecting adverse events. This work fills the gap between high-performance modeling and practical deployment, providing a reliable and efficient T1D management solution. Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) [1] is a chronic autoimmune condition requiring lifelong blood glucose concentration (BGC) monitoring to prevent life-threatening complications such as hypoglycemia (BGC below 70 mg/dL [2]) and hyperglycemia (BGC above 180 mg/dL [3]).

Gene-edited pancreatic cells have been transplanted into a patient with type 1 diabetes for the first time. They produced insulin for months without the patient needing to take immunosuppressants. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. Crispr gene-editing technology has demonstrated its revolutionary potential in recent years: It has been used to treat rare diseases, to adapt crops to withstand the extremes of climate change, or even to change the color of a spider's web.

Reinforcement learning (RL)-based dynamic treatment regimes (DTRs) hold promise for automating complex clinical decision-making, yet their practical deployment remains hindered by the intensive engineering required to inject clinical knowledge and ensure patient safety. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) suggest a complementary approach, where implicit prior knowledge and clinical heuristics are naturally embedded through linguistic prompts without requiring environment-specific training. In this study, we rigorously evaluate open-source LLMs as dynamic insulin dosing agents in an in silico Type 1 diabetes simulator, comparing their zero-shot inference performance against small neural network-based RL agents (SRAs) explicitly trained for the task. Our results indicate that carefully designed zero-shot prompts enable smaller LLMs (e.g., Qwen2.5-7B) to achieve comparable or superior clinical performance relative to extensively trained SRAs, particularly in stable patient cohorts. However, LLMs exhibit notable limitations, such as overly aggressive insulin dosing when prompted with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, highlighting critical failure modes including arithmetic hallucination, temporal misinterpretation, and inconsistent clinical logic. Incorporating explicit reasoning about latent clinical states (e.g., meals) yielded minimal performance gains, underscoring the current model's limitations in capturing complex, hidden physiological dynamics solely through textual inference. Our findings advocate for cautious yet optimistic integration of LLMs into clinical workflows, emphasising the necessity of targeted prompt engineering, careful validation, and potentially hybrid approaches that combine linguistic reasoning with structured physiological modelling to achieve safe, robust, and clinically effective decision-support systems.

Diabetes is a chronic metabolic disease characterized by elevated blood glucose levels, leading to complications like heart disease, kidney failure, and nerve damage. Accurate state-level predictions are vital for effective healthcare planning and targeted interventions, but in many cases, data for necessary analyses are incomplete. This study begins with a data engineering process to integrate diabetes-related datasets from 2011 to 2021 to create a comprehensive feature set. We then introduce an enhanced bagging ensemble regression model (EBMBag+) for time series forecasting to predict diabetes prevalence across U.S. cities. Several baseline models, including SVMReg, BDTree, LSBoost, NN, LSTM, and ERMBag, were evaluated for comparison with our EBMBag+ algorithm. The experimental results demonstrate that EBMBag+ achieved the best performance, with an MAE of 0.41, RMSE of 0.53, MAPE of 4.01, and an R2 of 0.9.

Brain stroke remains one of the principal causes of death and disability worldwide, yet most tabular-data prediction models still hover below the 95% accuracy threshold, limiting real-world utility. Addressing this gap, the present work develops and validates a completely data-driven and interpretable machine-learning framework designed to predict strokes using ten routinely gathered demographic, lifestyle, and clinical variables sourced from a public cohort of 4,981 records. We employ a detailed exploratory data analysis (EDA) to understand the dataset's structure and distribution, followed by rigorous data preprocessing, including handling missing values, outlier removal, and class imbalance correction using Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE). To streamline feature selection, point-biserial correlation and random-forest Gini importance were utilized, and ten varied algorithms-encompassing tree ensembles, boosting, kernel methods, and a multilayer neural network-were optimized using stratified five-fold cross-validation. Their predictions based on probabilities helped us build the proposed model, which included Random Forest, XGBoost, LightGBM, and a support-vector classifier, with logistic regression acting as a meta-learner. The proposed model achieved an accuracy rate of 97.2% and an F1-score of 97.15%, indicating a significant enhancement compared to the leading individual model, LightGBM, which had an accuracy of 91.4%. Our study's findings indicate that rigorous preprocessing, coupled with a diverse hybrid model, can convert low-cost tabular data into a nearly clinical-grade stroke-risk assessment tool.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown great promise in domains like healthcare and robotics but often struggles with adoption due to its lack of interpretability. Counterfactual explanations, which address "what if" scenarios, provide a promising avenue for understanding RL decisions but remain underexplored for continuous action spaces. We propose a novel approach for generating counterfactual explanations in continuous action RL by computing alternative action sequences that improve outcomes while minimizing deviations from the original sequence. Our approach leverages a distance metric for continuous actions and accounts for constraints such as adhering to predefined policies in specific states. Evaluations in two RL domains, Diabetes Control and Lunar Lander, demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, and generalization of our approach, enabling more interpretable and trustworthy RL applications.

This study underscores the potential of machine learning in stroke risk prediction, addressing key challenges such as class imbalance and feature selection. Our findings highlight the significant role of demographic, clinical, and lifestyle factors, with age, average glucose level, and BMI emerging as key predictors. Notably, the analysis reveals the importance of age-specific models, as the predictive influence of factors shifts across different age groups. In elderly patients (65-80 years), work type and glucose level become more influential, while hypertension and heart disease gain prominence. By achieving high predictive accuracy and identifying im-pactful features, this research supports the development of stroke risk assessment tools with potential integration into clinical decision systems. These tools could assist clinicians in early intervention planning and personalized prevention strategies. However, challenges such as data variability, model interpretability, and deployment in real-world healthcare settings remain. Future research should focus on improving model sensitivity, incorporating diverse datasets, and validating predictions in clinical environments. Advancing these models could enhance early detection strategies, ultimately improving patient outcomes and stroke prevention.

This paper explores the application of reinforcement learning to optimize the parameters of a Type-1 Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy controller, designed to operate as an artificial pancreas for Type 1 diabetes. The primary challenge in diabetes management is the dynamic nature of blood glucose levels, which are influenced by several factors such as meal intake and timing. Traditional controllers often struggle to adapt to these changes, leading to suboptimal insulin administration. To address this issue, we employ a reinforcement learning agent tasked with adjusting 27 parameters of the Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy controller at each time step, ensuring real-time adaptability. The study's findings demonstrate that this approach significantly enhances the robustness of the controller against variations in meal size and timing, while also stabilizing glucose levels with minimal exogenous insulin. This adaptive method holds promise for improving the quality of life and health outcomes for individuals with Type 1 diabetes by providing a more responsive and precise management tool. Simulation results are given to highlight the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Postprandial hyperglycemia, marked by the blood glucose level exceeding the normal range after meals, is a critical indicator of progression toward type 2 diabetes in prediabetic and healthy individuals. A key metric for understanding blood glucose dynamics after eating is the postprandial area under the curve (PAUC). Predicting PAUC in advance based on a person's diet and activity level and explaining what affects postprandial blood glucose could allow an individual to adjust their lifestyle accordingly to maintain normal glucose levels. In this paper, we propose GlucoLens, an explainable machine learning approach to predict PAUC and hyperglycemia from diet, activity, and recent glucose patterns. We conducted a five-week user study with 10 full-time working individuals to develop and evaluate the computational model. Our machine learning model takes multimodal data including fasting glucose, recent glucose, recent activity, and macronutrient amounts, and provides an interpretable prediction of the postprandial glucose pattern. Our extensive analyses of the collected data revealed that the trained model achieves a normalized root mean squared error (NRMSE) of 0.123. On average, GlucoLense with a Random Forest backbone provides a 16% better result than the baseline models. Additionally, GlucoLens predicts hyperglycemia with an accuracy of 74% and recommends different options to help avoid hyperglycemia through diverse counterfactual explanations. Code available: https://github.com/ab9mamun/GlucoLens.