Machine Learning in Biomedical Research: Application, Innovation and Exploration

A special issue of Bioengineering (ISSN 2306-5354). This special issue belongs to the section "Biosignal Processing".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 October 2026 | Viewed by 1781

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, China
Interests: statistics; epidemiology; cohort study; clinical trial; meta analysis; predict model; hypertension; neurology; omics; public health; cancer epidemiology
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Department of Radiology, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, China
Interests: MRI; brain development and injury

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Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Life Science and Technology, and Advanced Biomedical Imaging Facility, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China
Interests: medical image analysis; machine learning; stroke imaging; ultrasound CT imaging
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

As a core technology in the field of artificial intelligence, machine learning is transforming research across various disciplines at an unprecedented pace, with its interdisciplinary integration with biomedicine being particularly striking. With the advancement of modern measurement technologies, biomedical research has generated massive volumes of data, covering (but not limited to) multiple dimensions such as routine clinical data, cohort follow-up data, gene sequencing data, medical imaging data, and clinical medical records. Classical analytical methods are gradually revealing limitations in processing such complex data, while machine learning—endowed with powerful capabilities in pattern recognition, data analysis, and prediction—has brought new perspectives and tools to biomedical research, emerging as a crucial driving force for advancing biomedical studies. Based on this, we have curated this Special Issue, aiming to gather cutting-edge research achievements in this field, facilitate academic exchange and collaboration, and further promote the innovative application and development of machine learning in biomedicine.

The content of this Special Issue includes, but is not limited to, the following topics:

  • Innovation and application of machine learning methods in biomedical data analysis: Examples include methodological research and practical applications related to the fusion and modeling of high-dimensional multimodal data, as well as the modeling (data governance) of medical imaging data and functional data (e.g., ECG or EEG measurements).
  • Development and application of machine learning algorithms in precision medicine: This includes, but is not limited to, machine learning-based analysis of individualized treatment strategies, novel methods for heterogeneous treatment effect estimation and subgroup analysis, and innovative applications of existing methods.
  • Disease diagnosis and prediction: This includes, but is not limited to, the integration of multi-source information (such as patients’ genetic data, clinical history, lifestyle, and environmental factors) to construct novel disease risk prediction models.
  • Drug discovery and screening: In the stage of drug target identification, machine learning algorithms can conduct in-depth analysis of massive biomedical data (including genomics and proteomics data) to explore potential disease-related drug targets. The development and application of relevant methods are also within the focus of this Special Issue.
  • Challenges of machine learning methods in biomedical data analysis: Despite the remarkable achievements of machine learning in biomedical applications, it still faces numerous challenges, such as data privacy and security, data quality control (missing data and data governance), etc. Work in these areas is also a focus of this Special Issue.
  • Other important issues regarding the application of machine learning methods in biomedicine.

Dr. Fangyao Chen
Dr. Xianjun Li
Dr. Wu Qiu
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • artificial intelligence
  • machine learning
  • biomedical data mining
  • precision medicine and health
  • disease diagnosis and prediction
  • drug discovery and screening

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Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

16 pages, 13834 KB  
Article
A Single-Wavelength Near-Infrared Photoacoustic Spectroscopy for Noninvasive Glucose Detection Using Machine Learning
by Abdulrahman Aloraynan, Eunice Chu, Jishen Wang, Dawood Alsaedi and Dayan Ban
Bioengineering 2026, 13(4), 444; https://doi.org/10.3390/bioengineering13040444 - 10 Apr 2026
Viewed by 591
Abstract
According to the International Diabetes Federation, 589 million adults worldwide live with diabetes in 2025 (approximately 1 in 9 adults). The development of convenient noninvasive blood glucose monitoring systems has been a central focus in diabetes management. Optical spectroscopy has advanced significantly among [...] Read more.
According to the International Diabetes Federation, 589 million adults worldwide live with diabetes in 2025 (approximately 1 in 9 adults). The development of convenient noninvasive blood glucose monitoring systems has been a central focus in diabetes management. Optical spectroscopy has advanced significantly among all noninvasive glucose detection techniques. A photoacoustic system has been developed using a single-wavelength near-infrared laser, operating at 1625 nm, where glucose exhibits an overtone absorption band with relatively low water interference. The noninvasive system has been evaluated using artificial skin phantoms, with different glucose concentrations, covering both normoglycemic and hyperglycemic blood glucose levels. The detection sensitivity of the developed system has been enhanced to ±15 mg/dL across the entire clinically relevant glucose range. K-nearest neighbours and wide neural network machine learning models were developed for noninvasive glucose classification. The models achieved prediction accuracies of 80.0% and 81.5%, respectively, with 100% of the predicted data located within zones A and B of Clarke’s error grid analysis. These findings satisfy the regulatory requirements for glucose monitors established by Health Canada and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Full article
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16 pages, 1428 KB  
Article
StrDiSeg: Adapter-Enhanced DINOv3 for Automated Ischemic Stroke Lesion Segmentation
by Qiong Chen, Donghao Zhang, Yimin Chen, Siyuan Zhang, Yue Sun, Fabiano Reis, Li M. Li, Li Yuan, Huijuan Jin and Wu Qiu
Bioengineering 2026, 13(2), 133; https://doi.org/10.3390/bioengineering13020133 - 23 Jan 2026
Viewed by 886
Abstract
Deep vision foundation models such as DINOv3 offer strong visual representation capacity, but their direct deployment in medical image segmentation remains difficult due to the limited availability of annotated clinical data and the computational cost of full fine-tuning. This study proposes an adaptation [...] Read more.
Deep vision foundation models such as DINOv3 offer strong visual representation capacity, but their direct deployment in medical image segmentation remains difficult due to the limited availability of annotated clinical data and the computational cost of full fine-tuning. This study proposes an adaptation framework called StrDiSeg that integrates lightweight bottleneck adapters between selected transformer layers of DINOv3, enabling task-specific learning while preserving pretrained knowledge. An attention-enhanced U-Net decoder with multi-scale feature fusion further refines the representations. Experiments were performed on two publicly available ischemic stroke lesion segmentation datasets—AISD (Non Contrast CT) and ISLES22 (DWI). The proposed method achieved Dice scores of 0.516 on AISD and 0.824 on ISLES22, outperforming baseline models and demonstrating strong robustness across different clinical imaging modalities. These results indicate that adapter-based fine-tuning provides a practical and computationally efficient strategy for leveraging large pretrained vision models in medical image segmentation. Full article
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