This paper analyses the performance of SampEn and one of its derivatives, Fuzzy Entropy (FuzzyEn), in the context of artifacted blood glucose time series classification. This is a difficult and practically unexplored framework, where the availability of more sensitive and reliable measures could be of great clinical impact. Although the advent of new blood glucose monitoring technologies may reduce the incidence of the problems stated above, incorrect device or sensor manipulation, patient adherence, sensor detachment, time constraints, adoption barriers or affordability can still result in relatively short and artifacted records, as the ones analyzed in this paper or in other similar works. This study is aimed at characterizing the changes induced by such artifacts, enabling the arrangement of countermeasures in advance when possible. Despite the presence of these disturbances, results demonstrate that SampEn and FuzzyEn are sufficiently robust to achieve a significant classification performance, using records obtained from patients with duodenal-jejunal exclusion. The classification results, in terms of area under the ROC of up to 0.9, with several tests yielding AUC values also greater than 0.8, and in terms of a leave-one-out average classification accuracy of 80%, confirm the potential of these measures in this context despite the presence of artifacts, with SampEn having slightly better performance than FuzzyEn.
Keywords: blood glucose; fuzzy entropy; sample entropy; signal classification.