Diabetes Mellitus: Enquiry Into Its Medical Aspects and Bioengineering of Its Monitoring and Regulation

Abstract

Diabetes mellitus (DM) or hyperglycemia (in a more generalized term, high blood sugar) is a metabolic disorder that is now highly prevalent in the world population. Most of the food that people consume is converted into glucose, which enters the bloodstream following absorption–assimilation mechanisms. As a natural process, cells in our body utilize glucose for growth and energy. The glucose balance is maintained by a hormone called insulin that is secreted by the beta cells of pancreas. Hypotheses at the backdrop of DM occurrence are either (i) enough insulin is not produced and secreted resulting in increased level of glucose in blood, or (ii) insulin is insensitive to glucose, or (iii) insulin is non-targeted etc. If DM remains uncontrolled over time, it leads to serious damage to many of the body's systems, especially the nerves and blood vessels. This paper develops an enquiry into diabetes from many angles: (i) Diabetes as a disorder, its complications, causes, diagnostic tests, and treatment; (ii) Analysis of retinal and plantar images to characterize diabetes complications; (iii) How analysis of heart rate variability signals can depict diabetes; (iv) Biomedical engineering of the glucose–insulin regulatory system, and its employment in the modeling of the oral glucose tolerance test data, to detect diabetes as well as persons at risk of being diabetic; (v) Application of the glucose–insulin regulatory system to formulate an insulin delivery system for controlling blood sugar.

Diabetes Mechanisms, Detection and Complications Monitoring

“…The PSD of normal heart rate signal has LF, HF components. The diabetic heart rate signal, however, does not have HF components due to lower variability in the heart rate signal [Acharya et al, 2011b]. [Pincus, 1991].…”

“…Heart rate variability (HRV) decreases in patients with diabetes Acharya et al, 2011b;Faust et al, 2011]. This variability can be analyzed in the time domain, frequency domain, and by using non-linear methods.…”

“…5 [Nayak et al, 2008;Acharya et al, 2011a;Acharya et al 2009;Acharya et al, 2011b]. The green www.intechopen.com component of the RGB (Red, Green Blue) blood vessel image is considered for this study.…”

“…Finally, the image with only blood vessels is obtained (Fig. 7) [Acharya et al, 2011b]. It can be seen from Fig.…”

“…Fig. 6 shows the block diagram of the exudates extraction in digital fundus images Nayak et al, 2008;Acharya et al, 2011a;Acharya et al, 2011b]. The green component of the original image is extracted and subjected to the morphological closing operation by using octagonal shaped structuring element.…”