A Dual-Hormone Closed-Loop Delivery System for Type 1 Diabetes Using Deep Reinforcement Learning
This addresses the challenge of personalized glucose control for people with Type 1 Diabetes, though it is incremental as it builds on existing deep reinforcement learning techniques applied to a specific domain.
The researchers tackled the problem of automated hormone delivery for Type 1 Diabetes by developing a deep reinforcement learning system that uses dual hormones (insulin and glucagon) to manage blood glucose levels. The result was a strategy achieving 93% glucose time in target range for adults and 83% for adolescents in simulations, significantly outperforming previous methods.
We propose a dual-hormone delivery strategy by exploiting deep reinforcement learning (RL) for people with Type 1 Diabetes (T1D). Specifically, double dilated recurrent neural networks (RNN) are used to learn the hormone delivery strategy, trained by a variant of Q-learning, whose inputs are raw data of glucose \& meal carbohydrate and outputs are dual-hormone (insulin and glucagon) delivery. Without prior knowledge of the glucose-insulin metabolism, we run the method on the UVA/Padova simulator. Hundreds days of self-play are performed to obtain a generalized model, then importance sampling is adopted to customize the model for personal use. \emph{In-silico} the proposed strategy achieves glucose time in target range (TIR) $93\%$ for adults and $83\%$ for adolescents given standard bolus, outperforming previous approaches significantly. The results indicate that deep RL is effective in building personalized hormone delivery strategy for people with T1D.