Feedback control of chemotherapy drug scheduling for phase specific cancer treatment

Abstract

This paper presents a novel method of chemotherapy drug scheduling for cancer treatment using feedback control and genetic algorithm (GA). The main aim of chemotherapy treatment is to eradicate the tumour, if possible, or to reduce the tumour size to a minimum level with minimum toxic side effects. A feedback control method is developed in order to maintain a predefined level of drug concentration at tumour sites. The reference to the controller is chosen in such a way as to limit the drug concentration in the plasma which in turn limits the toxic side effects. A variant of Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) control, namely I-PD is used to control the drug to be infused to the patient's body. A phase specific cancer tumour model is developed and used for this work. The model, initially proposed by Martin [1], describes the effects of drug on different cell populations, plasma drug concentration and toxic side effects. The output of the I-PD control, which is chemotherapy drug dose, is applied to the model to observe its effects. Moreover, GA is used to optimise the parameters of the controller that in turn improves the drug scheduling as well as the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Results show that our method can reduce the tumour size significantly at the end of the treatment. Furthermore, the toxic side effects are always remained very low throughout the whole period. A comparative assessment is also provided to highlight the novelty of the proposed technique. It is noted that the proposed model offers best performance as compared to any reported models.