The use of artificial neural networks to control the concentration of a model drug released acoustically
- PDF / 1,282,209 Bytes
- 11 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 3 Downloads / 167 Views
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
The use of artificial neural networks to control the concentration of a model drug released acoustically Hesham G. Moussa 1 & Ghaleb A. Husseini 2 & Salma E. Ahmad 2 & Nahid Awad 2 Received: 4 October 2019 / Accepted: 13 February 2020 # Qatar University and Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Liposomes are designed to encapsulate chemotherapy drugs used in cancer treatment. Their small size (nano-scale) allows them to extravagate through the leaky vascular surroundings of the tumor. Ultrasound waves can be used as an external trigger to control drug release from these liposomes. It is essential that the therapeutic dose is released as cancer cells can develop drug resistance, in part due to the concentration levels of the chemotherapeutic agent dipping below therapeutic levels during the treatment. To address this issue, this study proposes a feedback drug release controller based on model predictive control theory (MPC) and neural networks (NN). Our preliminary simulation results suggest that using a feedback controller is capable of keeping drug concentration levels, in the tumor site, at or above therapeutic levels. This is achieved by controlling the amount of acoustic drug release from these lipid-based nanocarriers, thus ensuring a controlled, safe, and effective therapeutic dose. Keywords Model predictive control (MPC) . Drug delivery . Liposomes . Neural networks (NN)
1 Introduction Cancer is one of the deadliest diseases of the twenty-first century, claiming the lives of millions of people worldwide. Cancer affects many organs and tissues in the human body, and while it usually starts in a certain location/organ, it may spread to other parts of the body if not treated in a timely manner. The most widely used medical treatment for this ailment is chemotherapy, which involves the injection of therapeutic drugs into the bloodstream of the patient, inducing the death of cells and tissues. However, chemotherapy is not able to differentiate between the cancer cells and the fastgrowing healthy cells. Therefore, these drugs are associated with multiple adverse side effects because of the lack of specificity [1]. To overcome these unwanted effects, these toxic chemotherapy drugs can be encapsulated inside small nano-size vesicles Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s42247-020-00077-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Ghaleb A. Husseini [email protected] 1
Department of Electrical Engineering, American University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE
2
Department of Chemical Engineering, American University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE
(nanocarriers). Nanocarriers are safe, biocompatible, and biodegradable and could be designed to be stimuli-responsive. Nanoparticles can be prepared from organic (liposomes, micelles, dendrimers, and ferritins) or inorganic nanomaterials (gold nanoparticles, superparamagnetic iron oxide nanomaterials, quantum dots, and paramagnetic lanthanide ions) [2–5]. This mode of d
Data Loading...
