Potential predictors of type-2 diabetes risk: machine learning, synthetic data and wearable health devices

BMC Bioinformatics. 2020 Dec 14;21(Suppl 17):508. doi: 10.1186/s12859-020-03763-4.

Abstract

Background: The aim of a recent research project was the investigation of the mechanisms involved in the onset of type 2 diabetes in the absence of familiarity. This has led to the development of a computational model that recapitulates the aetiology of the disease and simulates the immunological and metabolic alterations linked to type-2 diabetes subjected to clinical, physiological, and behavioural features of prototypical human individuals.

Results: We analysed the time course of 46,170 virtual subjects, experiencing different lifestyle conditions. We then set up a statistical model able to recapitulate the simulated outcomes.

Conclusions: The resulting machine learning model adequately predicts the synthetic dataset and can, therefore, be used as a computationally-cheaper version of the detailed mathematical model, ready to be implemented on mobile devices to allow self-assessment by informed and aware individuals. The computational model used to generate the dataset of this work is available as a web-service at the following address: http://kraken.iac.rm.cnr.it/T2DM .

Keywords: Computational modeling; Emulator; Machine learning; Random forest; Synthetic data; T2D.

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Aged
  • Diabetes Mellitus, Type 2 / metabolism
  • Diabetes Mellitus, Type 2 / pathology*
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Machine Learning*
  • Male
  • Middle Aged
  • Models, Theoretical
  • Risk
  • User-Computer Interface
  • Wearable Electronic Devices