Carnegie Mellon University researchers have developed a new way to help doctors make better, personalized decisions and predict how a disease or treatment might play out in the future. Researchers from CMU’s School of Computer Science developed a new approach to bridge the gap between available data and actionable insight, creating personalized models to help doctors better understand individual patients and improve their prognosis. The researchers published their work in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The team introduced contextualized modeling, a family of ultra-personalized machine learning methods, to build individualized gene network models for nearly 8,000 tumors across 25 cancer types simultaneously. These networks helped identify new cancer biology, revealing hidden cancer subtypes and improving survival predictions, especially for rare cancers. This development opens the door to more precise, individualized cancer treatment.

A research paper by scientists at Chinese Academy of Sciences proposed a dual-task learning framework, the “Twin Brother” model, which fuses convolutional neural network (CNN), long short-term memory (LSTM), neural networks (NNs), and the squeezing-elicited attention mechanism to classify the lateral gait stage and estimate the hip angle from electromyography (EMG) signals.

The new research paper, published on May. 1 in the journal Cyborg and Bionic Systems, provide a “Twin Brother” model. The model is a dual-task learning framework designed for simultaneous gait phases recognition for lateral walking and continuous hip angle prediction.

Lead contamination in municipal water sources is a consistent threat to public health. Ingesting even tiny amounts of lead can harm the human brain and nervous system — especially in young children. To empower people to detect lead contamination in their own homes, a team of researchers developed an accessible, handheld water-testing system called the E-Tongue. This device, described in ACS Omega, was tested through a citizen science project across four Massachusetts towns.

Cohesin is a protein that forms a ring-shaped complex which wraps and alters the DNA molecule shape. It moves through the DNA and creates specific loops in the genetic material which determine the architecture of the genome and gene expression. Some mutations in the genes of the cohesion complex are responsible for rare diseases (cohesinopathies), such as the Cornelia de Lange syndrome (SCdL) or Roberts syndrome, which affect several organs and cause malformations during development.