Pseudo-spectral method for controlling the drug dosage in cancer

IET Syst Biol. 2020 Oct;14(5):261-270. doi: 10.1049/iet-syb.2020.0054.

Abstract

A mixed chemotherapy-immunotherapy treatment protocol is developed for cancer treatment. Chemotherapy pushes the trajectory of the system towards the desired equilibrium point, and then immunotherapy alters the dynamics of the system by affecting the parameters of the system. A co-existing cancerous equilibrium point is considered as the desired equilibrium point instead of the tumour-free equilibrium. Chemotherapy protocol is derived using the pseudo-spectral (PS) controller due to its high convergence rate and simple implementation structure. Thus, one of the contributions of this study is simplifying the design procedure and reducing the controller computational load in comparison with Lyapunov-based controllers. In this method, an infinite-horizon optimal control problem is proposed for a non-linear cancer model. Then, the infinite-horizon optimal control of cancer is transformed into a non-linear programming problem. The efficient Legendre PS scheme is suggested to solve the proposed problem. Then, the dynamics of the system is modified by immunotherapy is another contribution. To restrict the upper limit of the chemo-drug dose based on the age of the patients, a Mamdani fuzzy system is designed, which is not present yet. Simulation results on four different dynamics cases how the efficiency of the proposed treatment strategy.

MeSH terms

  • Computer Simulation
  • Dose-Response Relationship, Drug
  • Humans
  • Neoplasms / drug therapy*
  • Neural Networks, Computer
  • Pharmaceutical Preparations
  • Systems Biology / methods*

Substances

  • Pharmaceutical Preparations