A genetic programming-based regression for extrapolating a blood glucose-dynamics model from interstitial glucose measurements and their first derivatives

This paper illustrates the development and the applicability of an Evolutionary Computation approach to enhance the treatment of Type-1 diabetic patients that necessitate insulin injections. In fact, being such a disease associated to a malfunctioning pancreas that generates an insufficient amount of insulin, a way to enhance the quality of life of these patients is to implement an artificial pancreas able to artificially regulate the insulin dosage. This work aims at extrapolating a regression model, capable of estimating the blood glucose (BG) through interstitial glucose (IG) measurements and their numerical first derivatives. Such an approach represents a viable preliminary stage in building the basic component of this artificial pancreas. In particular, considered the high complexity of the reciprocal interactions, an evolutionary-based strategy is outlined to extrapolate a mathematical relationship between BG and IG and its derivative. The investigation is carried out about the accuracy of personalized models and of a global relationship model for all of the subjects under examination. The discovered models are assessed through a comparison with other models during the experiments on personalized and global data. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.