Updated Software for Automated Assessment of Glucose Variability and Quality of Glycemic Control in Diabetes

Abstract

<b><i>Background:</i></b> Glycemic variability is an important factor to consider in diabetes management. It can be assessed with multiple glycemic variability metrics and quality of control indices based on continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) recordings. For this, a robust repeatable calculation is important. A widely used tool for automated assessment is the EasyGV software. The aim of this work is to implement new methods of glycemic variability assessment in EasyGV and to validate implementation of each glucose metric in EasyGV against a reference implementation of the calculations. <b><i>Methods:</i></b> Validation data used came from the JDRF CGM study. Validation of the implementation of metrics that are available in EasyGV software v9 was carried out and the following new methods were added and validated: personal glycemic state, index of glycemic control, times in ranges, and glycemic variability percentage. Reference values considered gold standard calculations were derived from MATLAB implementation of each metric. <b><i>Results:</i></b> The Pearson correlation coefficient was above 0.98 for all metrics, except for mean amplitude of glycemic excursion (<i>r</i> = 0.87) as EasyGV implements a fuzzy logic approach to assessment of variability. Bland-Altman plots demonstrated validation of the new software. <b><i>Conclusions:</i></b> The new freely available EasyGV software v10 (www.phc.ox.ac.uk/research/technology-outputs/easygv) is a validated robust tool for analyzing different glycemic variabilities and control metrics.