A continuous-time adaptive particle filter for estimations under measurement time uncertainties with an application to a plasma-leucine mixed effects model

BMC Systems Biology A continuous-time adaptive particle filter for estimations under measurement time uncertainties with an application to a plasma-leucine mixed effects model Annette Krengel 0 3 Jan Hauth 0 3 Marja-Riitta Taskinen 2 Martin Adiels 1 5 Mats Jirstrand 4 0 Fraunhofer-Institut f u r Techno- und Wirtschaftsmathematik (ITWM; Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics) , Kaiserslautern , Germany 1 Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Gothenburg , Gothenburg , Sweden 2 Department of Medicine, University of Helsinki , Helsinki , Finland 3 Fraunhofer-Institut f u r Techno- und Wirtschaftsmathematik (ITWM; Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics) , Kaiserslautern , Germany 4 Fraunhofer Chalmers Centre (FCC) , Gothenburg , Sweden 5 Wallenberg laboratory, Sahlgrenska Center for Cardiovascular Research, Department of Medicine, University of Gothenburg , Gothenburg , Sweden Background: When mathematical modelling is applied to many different application areas, a common task is the estimation of states and parameters based on measurements. With this kind of inference making, uncertainties in the time when the measurements have been taken are often neglected, but especially in applications taken from the life sciences, this kind of errors can considerably influence the estimation results. As an example in the context of personalized medicine, the model-based assessment of the effectiveness of drugs is becoming to play an important role. Systems biology may help here by providing good pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic (PK/PD) models. Inference on these systems based on data gained from clinical studies with several patient groups becomes a major challenge. Particle filters are a promising approach to tackle these difficulties but are by itself not ready to handle uncertainties in measurement times. Results: In this article, we describe a variant of the standard particle filter (PF) algorithm which allows state and parameter estimation with the inclusion of measurement time uncertainties (MTU). The modified particle filter, which we call MTU-PF, also allows the application of an adaptive stepsize choice in the time-continuous case to avoid degeneracy problems. The modification is based on the model assumption of uncertain measurement times. While the assumption of randomness in the measurements themselves is common, the corresponding measurement times are generally taken as deterministic and exactly known. Especially in cases where the data are gained from measurements on blood or tissue samples, a relatively high uncertainty in the true measurement time seems to be a natural assumption. Our method is appropriate in cases where relatively few data are used from a relatively large number of groups or individuals, which introduce mixed effects in the model. This is a typical setting of clinical studies. We demonstrate the method on a small artificial example and apply it to a mixed effects model of plasma-leucine kinetics with data from a clinical study which included 34 patients. Conclusions: Comparisons of our MTU-PF with the standard PF and with an alternative Maximum Likelihood estimation method on the small artificial example clearly show that the MTU-PF obtains better estimations. Considering the application to the data from the clinical study, the MTU-PF shows a similar performance with respect to the quality of estimated parameters compared with the standard particle filter, but besides that, the MTU algorithm shows to be less prone to degeneration than the standard particle filter. Particle filter; Sequential Monte Carlo methods; Nonlinear filtering; Parameter estimation; Measurement time uncertainties; PK/PD; Mixed effects; Leucine kinetics - Background Measurement time uncertainties Uncertainty in the time at which a measurement is taken is an often neglected source of random error. While in many application areas, this kind of error is generally small and indeed neglectable (due to automated measurements and precise timings), in others it may be of real influence, especially in the life sciences. As a prominent example, one may consider pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic (PK/PD) models which are used to describe the metabolic interactions and the effects of a chemical agent (like a drug or a labelled substance) over time inside an organism, respectively. A typical population experiment in the PK/PD context consists in the analysis of the contents of the blood plasma of several individuals with respect to concentrations of certain molecules of interest. For this purpose, blood probes have to be taken from each individual at certain (fixed) time points after a certain event has occurred (e.g. a drug or a labelled substance has been applied). It is clear from the setting of the experiments that there is some variation in the real point in time when the blood probe has been taken: the true time when the measurement value has been obtained might be shortly before or after the intended time, and this true measurement time is not known to us. Since the inclusion of those time uncertainties in the model usually makes the analysis more difficult, it is standard to lump the time uncertainties with the measurement error. But especially at early times when concentrations change quickly, this may easily lead to wrong estimations, even if one assumes very high variances of the measurement error (we will demonstrate this later on a simple example). On the other hand, the inclusion of measurement time uncertainties (MTU) in algorithms aiming at inference making in complex models is not straightforward. In this article, we will present a modification of the Particle Filter (PF) algorithm (which we call MTU-PF) which is able to fully include a statistical model of the time uncertainties. Inference in complex systems The assessment of the effectiveness of a drug in a clinical study has been done in the past by the direct computation of relatively simple statistical values. The enormous increase in complexity of the underlying models, due to present developments in medicine and biology, for instance in the areas of personalized medicine or systems biology, increases also the need for more sophisticated model-based inference methods. The estimation of unobservable internal variables or model parameters from data which have been obtained from blood or tissue samples at several time points can reveal information on the concentrations and effectiveness of the substance under question. If these data come from individuals which belong to two different (or even more) groups, e.g. test and control group, mixed effects are introduced in the underlying models. The inherent non-linearity and high variability of biological processes adds considerably to the difficulties one faces during the inference step. Inference in connection with dynamic models plays a major role in many other application areas. State and parameter estimation as well as model disc (...truncated)