Accurate spectroscopic calibration for noninvasive glucose monitoring by modeling the physiological glucose dynamics

The physiological lag between blood and interstitial fluid (ISF) glucose is a major challenge for noninvasive glucose concentration measurements. This is a particular problem for spectroscopic techniques, which predominantly probe ISF glucose, creating inconsistencies in calibration, where blood glucose measurements are used as a reference. To overcome this problem, we present a dynamic concentration correction (DCC) scheme, based on the mass transfer of glucose between blood and ISF, to ensure consistency with the spectral measurements. The proposed formalism allows the transformation of glucose in the concentration domain, ensuring consistency with the acquired spectra in the calibration model. Taking Raman spectroscopy as a specific example, we demonstrate that the predicted glucose concentrations using the DCC-based calibration model closely match the measured glucose concentrations, while those generated with the conventional calibration methods show significantly larger deviations from the measured values. In addition, we provide an analytical formula for a previously unidentified source of limiting uncertainty arising in spectroscopic glucose monitoring from a lack of knowledge of glucose kinetics in prediction samples. A study with human volunteers undergoing glucose tolerance tests indicates that this lag uncertainty, which is comparable in magnitude to the uncertainty arising from noise and nonorthogonality in the spectral data set, can be reduced substantially by employing the DCC scheme in spectroscopic calibration.