Biologyarticle2026-09-17

Conditional deep generative modeling of blood-based infrared spectra enables controlled in-silico phenotyping studies

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Abstract

Abstract Infrared molecular fingerprinting of blood offers a scalable, minimally invasive window into human physiology, but limited follow-up, imbalanced cohorts, and restricted access to diverse phenotypes constrain systematic studies. Here, we introduce a conditional deep generative framework for synthesizing blood-based infrared spectra that preserves individual-level structure while allowing controlled manipulation of demographic and anthropometric covariates. Using 25,308 spectra from 5,863 ostensibly healthy participants in the longitudinal Health4Hungary - Hungary4Health cohort, we train a Conditional Variational Autoencoder, a Conditional Boundary Equilibrium GAN, and a Conditional Diffusion Model to generate blood-based infrared spectra conditioned on age, sex, and body mass index. We show that the generated spectra closely match held-out real data across multiple levels and faithfully encode demographic and anthropometric information. We further demonstrate two in-silico applications: modeling of individualized healthy aging trajectories that follow cohort-level aging manifolds while retaining individual-specific characteristics, and targeted augmentation of underrepresented body mass index categories. Together, these results demonstrate the feasibility of utilizing conditional generative modeling of blood-based infrared spectra for virtual cohort construction, cohort balancing, and controlled in-silico phenotyping, paving the way toward more comprehensive and data-efficient studies in precision health.

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View paper (DOI)Open access versionOpenAlexnpj Digital MedicinePublished 2026-09-17

Authors: Niklas Leopold-Kerschbaumer, Timo Halenke, Selina Süzeroğlu, Moritz Jung, Mariia Seleznova, Nicole Thorisch, Jeanette M. Lorenz, Thomas Bocklitz, Bjoern M. Eskofier, Gitta Kutyniok, Ferenc Krausz, Kosmas V. Kepesidis

Institutions: University of Hong Kong, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e. V. (DLR), Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Hong Kong Baptist University, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, LMU Klinikum, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Helmholtz Munich, Leibniz Institute of Photonic Technology, Munich Center for Machine Learning, Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, Fraunhofer Institute for Cognitive Systems