Lifestyle-Informed Personalized Blood Biomarker Prediction via Novel Representation Learning
This work addresses the need for personalized healthcare by improving risk stratification and preventative care strategies, though it is incremental as it builds on existing representation learning methods.
The paper tackled the problem of predicting future blood biomarker values and defining personalized references by learning representations from lifestyle data and biomarkers, showing that their deep-learned embeddings outperform state-of-the-art techniques in predicting clinical diagnosis using the UK Biobank dataset.
Blood biomarkers are an essential tool for healthcare providers to diagnose, monitor, and treat a wide range of medical conditions. Current reference values and recommended ranges often rely on population-level statistics, which may not adequately account for the influence of inter-individual variability driven by factors such as lifestyle and genetics. In this work, we introduce a novel framework for predicting future blood biomarker values and define personalized references through learned representations from lifestyle data (physical activity and sleep) and blood biomarkers. Our proposed method learns a similarity-based embedding space that captures the complex relationship between biomarkers and lifestyle factors. Using the UK Biobank (257K participants), our results show that our deep-learned embeddings outperform traditional and current state-of-the-art representation learning techniques in predicting clinical diagnosis. Using a subset of UK Biobank of 6440 participants who have follow-up visits, we validate that the inclusion of these embeddings and lifestyle factors directly in blood biomarker models improves the prediction of future lab values from a single lab visit. This personalized modeling approach provides a foundation for developing more accurate risk stratification tools and tailoring preventative care strategies. In clinical settings, this translates to the potential for earlier disease detection, more timely interventions, and ultimately, a shift towards personalized healthcare.