MEMP PhD Thesis Defense: Elizabeth Healey

Precision Medicine in Diabetes Using Continuous Glucose Monitoring

Diabetes affects millions of individuals around the world and is a leading cause of death. The risk of serious long-term complications in diabetes can be mitigated through early interventions in the form of medication and behavioral changes. However, the pathophysiology of diabetes and the course of the disease is markedly heterogeneous, making it essential that disease management is tailored to the individual. Continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) helps patients manage their disease through the collection of real-time measurements of interstitial glucose, providing insight into glycemic dynamics that laboratory measurements cannot capture. In this thesis, we investigate how CGM can be used to enable targeted, personalized disease management in diabetes using modern methods from machine learning and signal processing. We first investigate a model-based approach to estimate metabolic parameters from CGM data. We show that parameters estimated from daily CGM data correlate with parameters derived from in-clinic laboratory measurements. Then, we explore how the rapidly emerging field of generative artificial intelligence can be integrated into diabetes care through analysis of CGM data. We show how large language model agents hold promising potential to assist patients and clinicians in managing diabetes through the synthesis and narrative summarization of large amounts of CGM data. Finally, we leverage observational CGM data to understand heterogeneity in type 2 diabetes, and we propose novel phenotypes of diabetes based on CGM features. The work in this thesis underscores how modern computational methods in machine learning can enable precision medicine in diabetes by leveraging wearable CGM data for improved disease management.

Thesis Supervisor:
Isaac Kohane, MD, PhD
Chair and Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School

Thesis Committee Chair:
Thomas Heldt, PhD
W.M. Keck Career Development Professor of Electrical and Biomedical Engineering, MIT

Thesis Reader:
David Nathan, MD
Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School

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Elizabeth Healey is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting

Topic: Elizabeth Healey MEMP PhD Thesis Defense
Time: Wednesday, February 26, 2025, 3:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

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