Evaluating Type-1 Diabetes Digital Twins by Decision Quality

Overview & Synopsis

A digital twin (DT) for type 1 diabetes (T1D) can predict how an individual's blood glucose will respond to different insulin treatments without actually trying them. For each treatment, downstream statistics of predicted glucose trajectories, such as glycemic risk, can be computed to guide clinical decisions. However, the quality of DTs is usually measured by the accuracy of their predicted glucose trajectories, which may not reflect the quality of the downstream treatment decisions they inform. In this work, we directly evaluate DTs by this decision quality on downstream treatment ranking, i.e., whether a DT predicts glucose trajectories that can be used to rank candidate treatments as the real patient would. We present an evaluation protocol over 30 virtual patients from the FDA-accepted UVA/Padova model, each simulated under 21 different basal-bolus treatments. For each patient, a DT is fitted under one treatment and then produces glucose trajectories for the remaining 20 treatments. Our results show that prediction accuracy and decision quality disagree. A baseline that models the average patient, never seeing the individual's glucose data, has the lowest prediction accuracy of all six methods (RMSE: 63.6 mg/dL) but ranks treatments with the second-highest mean Spearman (0.766), while a black-box neural network that predicts glucose nearly twice as accurately (RMSE: 32.9 mg/dL) ranks them no better than a random ordering of the 20 treatments (0.049 Spearman). Therefore, selecting a DT based on prediction accuracy alone can prefer one that recommends treatments at chance, and decision quality must be evaluated directly rather than assumed to follow from prediction accuracy.