An evolutionary methodology for estimating blood glucose levels from interstitial glucose measurements and their derivatives

Abstract

The patients suffering from diabetes are subjected to several serious medical risks that can lead also to fatal consequences. To enhance the quality of life of these patients there is the necessity to devise an artificial pancreas able to inject an insulin bolus when needed. This paper presents a genetic-programming based algorithm to extrapolate a regression model able to estimate the blood glucose (BG) level through interstitial glucose (IG) measurements and their derivatives. This algorithm represents a possible step in building the fundamental element of such an artificial pancreas, namely a new evolutionary computation-based metodology to derive a mathematical relationship between BG and IG. The proposed evolutionary automatic procedure is evaluated on a real-world database made up of both BG and IG measurements of people suffering from Type 1 diabetes. The discovered model is validated through a comparison with other techniques during the experimental phase.