title: Model-based control of plasma glycemia: Tests on populations of virtual patients.
abstract: Closed-loop devices delivering medical treatments in an automatic fashion clearly require a thorough preliminary phase according to which the proposed control law is tested and validated as realistically as possible, before arranging in vivo experiments in a clinical setting. The present note develops a virtual environment aiming to validate a recently proposed model-based glucose control law on a solid simulation framework. From a theoretical viewpoint, the artificial pancreas has been designed by suitably exploiting a minimal set of delay differential equations modeling the glucose-insulin regulatory system; on the other hand, the validation platform makes use of a different, multi-compartmental model to build up a population of virtual patients. Simulations are carried out by properly addressing the available technological limits and the unavoidable uncertainties in real-time continuous glucose sensors as well as possible malfunctioning on the insulin delivery devices. The results show the robustness of the proposed control law that turns out to be efficient and extremely safe on a heterogenous population of virtual patients.
authors.affiliation: Istituto di Analisi dei Sistemi ed Informatica "A. Ruberti", Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (IASI-CNR), BioMatLab - UCSC - Largo A. Gemelli 8, 00168 Roma, Italy. Electronic address: pasquale.palumbo@iasi.cnr.it.
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Palumbo
authors.affiliation: Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Center for Micro-BioRobotics@SSSA, Viale R. Piaggio 34, 56025 Pontedera, Italy; Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, The BioRobotics Institute, Viale R. Piaggio 34, 56025 Pontedera, Italy.
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Pizzichelli
authors.affiliation: Istituto di Analisi dei Sistemi ed Informatica "A. Ruberti", Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (IASI-CNR), BioMatLab - UCSC - Largo A. Gemelli 8, 00168 Roma, Italy.
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Panunzi
authors.affiliation: Università degli Studi dellAquila, 67040 Poggio di Roio, L'Aquila, Italy.
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Pepe
authors.affiliation: Istituto di Analisi dei Sistemi ed Informatica "A. Ruberti", Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (IASI-CNR), BioMatLab - UCSC - Largo A. Gemelli 8, 00168 Roma, Italy.
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: De Gaetano
mesh_terms: D001786:Blood Glucose / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008954:Models, Biological; D019397:Pancreas, Artificial; D014584:User-Computer Interface
chemical_list: D001786:Blood Glucose
keywords: Artificial pancreas; Feedback control law; Time-delay systems