Multi-objective particle swarm optimisation for phase specific cancer drug scheduling

An effective chemotherapy drug scheduling requires adequate balancing of administration of anti-cancer drugs to reduce the tumour size as well as toxic side effects. Conventional clinical methods very often fail to balance between these two parameters due to their inherent conflicting nature. This paper presents a method of phase specific drug scheduling using a close-loop control method and multi-objective particle swarm optimisation algorithm (MOPSO) that can provide solutions for trading-off between the cell killing and toxic side effects. A close-loop control method, namely Integral-Proportional-Derivative (I-PD) is designed to control the drug to be infused to the patient’s body and MOPSO is used to find suitable parameters of the controller. A phase specific cancer tumour model is used for this work to show the effects of drug on tumour. Results show that the proposed method can generate very efficient drug scheduling that trade-off between cell killing and toxic side effects and satisfy associated design goals, for example lower drug doses and lower drug concentration. Moreover, our approach can reduce the number of proliferating and quiescent cells up to 72% and 60% respectively; maximum reduction with phase-specific model compared to reported work available so far.