In Silico Clinical Trials of Biomedical Devices through Model Checking Driven Simulation: an Application to Artificial Pancreas for Patients with Type I Diabetes Mellitus
The advance of biomedical engineering has promoted the design of new and revolutionary biomedical devices.
The purpose of such devices is to improve the quality of life in patients affected by different kinds of diseases by making the treatments they follow completely, or partially, automated. As one would expect, the more the effects of a biomedical device are relevant on health, the more the consequences due to a possible malfunction are critical. For instance, the artificial pancreas is a safety-critical device for blood glucose levels monitoring and regulation in patients with Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus (T1DM). If not correctly designed, the artificial pancreas has the capability to lead a patient to coma or worst, to death. As a consequence, design and evaluation of biomedical devices is often a long and expensive process also involving clinical experimentations with human volunteers (i.e., clinical trials).
In this setting, In Silico Clinical Trials (ISCT), i.e., clinical experimental campaigns carried out by means of computer simulations, hold the promise to decrease time and cost for the safety and efficacy assessment of biomedical devices.
The goal of this project is to perform In Silico Clinical Trials (ISCT) of software-controlled biomedical devices through model checking-driven simulations.