Noninvasive near-infrared blood glucose monitoring using a calibration model built by a numerical simulation method: Trial application to patients in an intensive care unit.

We have applied a new methodology for noninvasive continuous blood glucose monitoring, proposed in our previous paper, to patients in ICU (intensive care unit), where strict controls of blood glucose levels are required. The new methodology can build calibration models essentially from numerical simulation, while the conventional methodology requires pre-experiments such as sugar tolerance tests, which are impossible to perform on ICU patients in most cases. The in vivo experiments in this study consisted of two stages, the first stage conducted on healthy subjects as preliminary experiments, and the second stage on ICU patients. The prediction performance of the first stage was obtained as a correlation coefficient (r) of 0.71 and standard error of prediction (SEP) of 28.7 mg/dL. Of the 323 total data, 71.5% were in the A zone, 28.5% were in the B zone, and none were in the C, D, and E zones for the Clarke error-grid analysis. The prediction performance of the second stage was obtained as an r of 0.97 and SEP of 27.2 mg/dL. Of the 304 total data, 80.3% were in the A zone, 19.7% were in the B zone, and none were in the C, D, and E zones. These prediction results suggest that the new methodology has the potential to realize a noninvasive blood glucose monitoring system using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) in ICUs. Although the total performance of the present monitoring system has not yet reached a satisfactory level as a stand-alone system, it can be developed as a complementary system to the conventional one used in ICUs for routine blood glucose management, which checks the blood glucose levels of patients every few hours.