Optimal selection of injection doses and injection timings for insulin therapy in a limited time

• Published in: Advances in difference equations 2020-12, Vol.2020 (1), Article 653
• Main Authors: Liu, Shouzong, Yu, Ling, Huang, Mingzhan, Shi, Xiangyun
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Analysis; Cost function; Difference and Functional Equations; Functional Analysis; Hyperglycemia; Hypoglycemia; Insulin; Mathematics; Mathematics and Statistics; Ordinary Differential Equations; Partial Differential Equations; Rescaling; Risk management
• ISSN: 1687-1847; 1687-1839; 1687-1847
• DOI: 10.1186/s13662-020-03111-z

In this paper, we study the injection strategies of insulin for the impulsive therapy of diabetes in a limited time. According to whether we consider the risk of hypoglycemia or not, we develop two different control objectives and investigate three different injection strategies for each control objective. We apply a time-rescaling method to overcome technical obstacles in optimal impulsive control and compute the gradient formulas of cost functions with respect to injection doses and injection timings. By means of numerical simulations we get the optimal injection doses and injection timings for each injection strategy. Our study indicates that for the control objective without considering the risk of hypoglycemia, the optimal injection timing control is more effective than the optimal injection dose control, whereas the mixed control achieves almost the same effect as the optimal injection timing control. For the other control objective considering the risk of hypoglycemia, the optimal injection timing control performs better than the optimal injection dose control in avoiding emergence of hypoglycemia, and the mixed control provides the best strategy in preventing hyperglycemia from occurrence.