AI and the World's Hard Problems · Medicine & drug discovery · Nature · 2026-10-14
Artificial intelligence-enabled clinical phenotyping of human brown fat
Methods for quantifying brown adipose tissue (BAT) activity in humans at scale have been lacking. Using data from 101,243 patients at a large cancer centre, the authors semi-automatically quantified BAT activity in about 8,700 patients with machine learning. Higher BAT activity, especially in the axillary depot, was associated with lower odds of cardiometabolic disease and healthier white fat distribution.