Long-Term Prediction of Blood Glucose Levels in Type 1 Diabetes Using a CNN-LSTM-Based Deep Neural Network

In this work, we leverage state-of-the-art deep learning-based algorithms for blood glucose (BG) forecasting in people with type 1 diabetes.

We propose stacks of convolutional neural network and long short-term memory units to predict BG level for 30-, 60-, and 90-minute prediction horizon (PH), given historical glucose measurements, meal information, and insulin intakes. The evaluation was performed on two data sets, Replace-BG and DIAdvisor, representative of free-living conditions and in-hospital setting, respectively.

For 90-minute PH, our model obtained mean absolute error of 17.30 ± 2.07 and 18.23 ± 2.97 mg/dL, root mean square error of 23.45 ± 3.18 and 25.12 ± 4.65 mg/dL, coefficient of determination of 84.13 ± 4.22% and 82.34 ± 4.54%, and in terms of the continuous glucose-error grid analysis 94.71 ± 3.89% and 91.71 ± 4.32% accurate predictions, 1.81 ± 1.06% and 2.51 ± 0.86% benign errors, and 3.47 ± 1.12% and 5.78 ± 1.72% erroneous predictions, for Replace-BG and DIAdvisor data sets, respectively.

Our investigation demonstrated that our method achieved superior glucose forecasting compared with existing approaches in the literature, and thanks to its generalizability showed potential for real-life applications.