Nonlinear identification of a tumor growth model for validating cancer treatments

Abstract

In case of physiological related researches the appropriate adjustment of the parameters of the mathematical models describing biological phenomenons is a crucial issue. These models are essential in many research field such as the personalized health care or the control of physiological processes. Despite the available identification techniques there is no general solution in those cases where the mathematical model is given, but highly nonlinear in order to capture the main dynamical attitude of the physiological processes to be described. One of our aims was to develop such a general nonlinear identification framework which is flexible, can be easily used and supports the identification of these kind of models. We defined different metrics to measure the performance of the developed system. From the other hand, our goal was to successfully realize the identification framework in case of tumor growth beside anti-angiogenic treatment which is essential in our future work in order to validate the performance of advanced control algorithms. The results show that the nonlinear identification framework performed well in this case, since the predefined requirements from the applied metrics points of view were satisfied in all cases.