A decision support system for type 1 diabetes mellitus diagnostics based on dual channel analysis of red blood cell membrane fluidity

Comput Methods Programs Biomed. 2018 Aug:162:263-271. doi: 10.1016/j.cmpb.2018.05.025. Epub 2018 May 17.

Abstract

Background and objective: Investigation of membrane fluidity by metabolic functional imaging opens up a new and important area of translational research in type 1 diabetes mellitus, being a useful and sensitive biomarker for disease monitoring and treatment. We investigate here how data on membrane fluidity can be used for diabetes monitoring.

Methods: We present a decision support system that distinguishes between healthy subjects, type 1 diabetes mellitus patients, and type 1 diabetes mellitus patients with complications. It leverages on dual channel data computed from the physical state of human red blood cells membranes by means of features based on first- and second-order statistical measures as well as on rotation invariant co-occurrence local binary patterns. The experiments were carried out on a dataset of more than 1000 images belonging to 27 subjects.

Results: Our method shows a global accuracy of 100%, outperforming also the state-of-the-art approach based on the glycosylated hemoglobin.

Conclusions: The proposed recognition approach permits to achieve promising results.

Keywords: Feature extraction; Image processing; Machine learning; Two-photon microscopy; Type 1 Diabetes.

MeSH terms

  • Case-Control Studies
  • Diabetes Mellitus, Type 1 / diagnosis*
  • Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted*
  • Erythrocyte Membrane / physiology*
  • Erythrocytes / cytology*
  • Female
  • Glycated Hemoglobin
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted
  • Male
  • Membrane Fluidity*
  • Pattern Recognition, Automated
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Software

Substances

  • Glycated Hemoglobin A