LSTMs and Deep Residual Networks for Carbohydrate and Bolus Recommendations in Type 1 Diabetes Management

Blood Glucose Prediction from Nutrition Analytics in Type 1 Diabetes: A Review

INTRODUCTION

Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) affects over 9 million worldwide and necessitates meticulous self-management for blood glucose (BG) control. Utilizing BG prediction technology allows for increased BG control and a reduction in the diabetes burden caused by self-management requirements. This paper reviews BG prediction models in T1D, which include nutritional components.

METHOD

A systematic search, utilizing the PRISMA guidelines, identified articles focusing on BG prediction algorithms for T1D that incorporate nutritional variables. Eligible studies were screened and analyzed for model type, inclusion of additional aspects in the model, prediction horizon, patient population, inputs, and accuracy.

RESULTS

The study categorizes 138 blood glucose prediction models into data-driven (54%), physiological (14%), and hybrid (33%) types. Prediction horizons of ≤30 min are used in 36% of models, 31-60 min in 34%, 61-90 min in 11%, 91-120 min in 10%, and >120 min in 9%. Neural networks are the most used data-driven technique (47%), and simple carbohydrate intake is commonly included in models (data-driven: 72%, physiological: 52%, hybrid: 67%). Real or free-living data are predominantly used (83%).

CONCLUSION

The primary goal of blood glucose prediction in T1D is to enable informed decisions and maintain safe BG levels, considering the impact of all nutrients for meal planning and clinical relevance.

Digital Health and Machine Learning Technologies for Blood Glucose Monitoring and Management of Gestational Diabetes

Innovations in digital health and machine learning are changing the path of clinical health and care. People from different geographical locations and cultural backgrounds can benefit from the mobility of wearable devices and smartphones to monitor their health ubiquitously. This paper focuses on reviewing the digital health and machine learning technologies used in gestational diabetes - a subtype of diabetes that occurs during pregnancy. This paper reviews sensor technologies used in blood glucose monitoring devices, digital health innovations and machine learning models for gestational diabetes monitoring and management, in clinical and commercial settings, and discusses future directions. Despite one in six mothers having gestational diabetes, digital health applications were underdeveloped, especially the techniques that can be deployed in clinical practice. There is an urgent need to (1) develop clinically interpretable machine learning methods for patients with gestational diabetes, assisting health professionals with treatment, monitoring, and risk stratification before, during and after their pregnancies; (2) adapt and develop clinically-proven devices for patient self-management of health and well-being at home settings ("virtual ward" and virtual consultation), thereby improving clinical outcomes by facilitating timely intervention; and (3) ensure innovations are affordable and sustainable for all women with different socioeconomic backgrounds and clinical resources.

The importance of interpreting machine learning models for blood glucose prediction in diabetes: an analysis using SHAP

Machine learning has become a popular tool for learning models of complex dynamics from biomedical data. In Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) management, these models are increasingly been integrated in decision support systems (DSS) to forecast glucose levels and provide preventive therapeutic suggestions, like corrective insulin boluses (CIB), accordingly. Typically, models are chosen based on their prediction accuracy. However, since patient safety is a concern in this application, the algorithm should also be physiologically sound and its outcome should be explainable. This paper aims to discuss the importance of using tools to interpret the output of black-box models in T1D management by presenting a case-of-study on the selection of the best prediction algorithm to integrate in a DSS for CIB suggestion. By retrospectively "replaying" real patient data, we show that two long-short term memory neural networks (LSTM) (named p-LSTM and np-LSTM) with similar prediction accuracy could lead to different therapeutic decisions. An analysis with SHAP-a tool for explaining black-box models' output-unambiguously shows that only p-LSTM learnt the physiological relationship between inputs and glucose prediction, and should therefore be preferred. This is verified by showing that, when embedded in the DSS, only p-LSTM can improve patients' glycemic control.

GluGAN: Generating Personalized Glucose Time Series Using Generative Adversarial Networks

Time series data generated by continuous glucose monitoring sensors offer unparalleled opportunities for developing data-driven approaches, especially deep learning-based models, in diabetes management. Although these approaches have achieved state-of-the-art performance in various fields such as glucose prediction in type 1 diabetes (T1D), challenges remain in the acquisition of large-scale individual data for personalized modeling due to the elevated cost of clinical trials and data privacy regulations. In this work, we introduce GluGAN, a framework specifically designed for generating personalized glucose time series based on generative adversarial networks (GANs). Employing recurrent neural network (RNN) modules, the proposed framework uses a combination of unsupervised and supervised training to learn temporal dynamics in latent spaces. Aiming to assess the quality of synthetic data, we apply clinical metrics, distance scores, and discriminative and predictive scores computed by post-hoc RNNs in evaluation. Across three clinical datasets with 47 T1D subjects (including one publicly available and two proprietary datasets), GluGAN achieved better performance for all the considered metrics when compared with four baseline GAN models. The performance of data augmentation is evaluated by three machine learning-based glucose predictors. Using the training sets augmented by GluGAN significantly reduced the root mean square error for the predictors over 30 and 60-minute horizons. The results suggest that GluGAN is an effective method in generating high-quality synthetic glucose time series and has the potential to be used for evaluating the effectiveness of automated insulin delivery algorithms and as a digital twin to substitute for pre-clinical trials.

Diabetes Technology Meeting 2021

Diabetes Technology Society hosted its annual Diabetes Technology Meeting on November 4 to November 6, 2021. This meeting brought together speakers to discuss various developments within the field of diabetes technology. Meeting topics included blood glucose monitoring, continuous glucose monitoring, novel sensors, direct-to-consumer telehealth, metrics for glycemia, software for diabetes, regulation of diabetes technology, diabetes data science, artificial pancreas, novel insulins, insulin delivery, skin trauma, metabesity, precision diabetes, diversity in diabetes technology, use of diabetes technology in pregnancy, and green diabetes. A live demonstration on a mobile app to monitor diabetic foot wounds was presented.