The main point of this contribution is to show how ideas of control theory, automata theory and computer science can be applied to the field of cancer research. We are stressing the modelling of three-dimensional tumor growth and the simulation of different kinds of tumor therapy (surgery, radiation therapy, chemotherapy). In the future it will be possible to schedule the optimized methods and time of tumor treatment by computer simulation prior to clinical therapy.
The proliferation of malignant cells and tumor growth can be studied at various levels and from different viewpoints in the field of tumor biology and oncology. The aim of this paper is to outline how control theory and computer science can pave the way to new approaches to interpreting tumor growth and treatment. The present development is based on the hypothesis that the proliferation of malignant cells may be simulated by an unstable closed-loop control circuit. This type of model only describes the number of cells as a function of time. Therefore, an extended model permitting the study of the spatial structure of tumor growth is chosen. This approach leads to three-dimensional models simulating tumor growth in a vascularized tissue segment and opens the possibility of determining optimized chemotherapeutic tumor-treatment schedules. In the future it may become possible to perform computer simulations of different kinds of tumor treatment prior to clinical therapy.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.