Prototyping virtual cancer therapist (VCT): a software engineering approach

This paper proposes the virtual cancer therapist (VCT), a scalable and robust cancer expert system that makes cancer diagnosis, recommends therapy plans, and simulates therapy plans in silico. This system consists of an evaluation core that makes prognosis and chemotherapy simulations, a biomedical database that supports therapy planning, and an optimizer module that makes cancer diagnosis and produces queries for the optimal therapy plans. With the support of its patient record database and simulation core, VCT can also be used to establish an in silico drug discovery standard that dramatically reduces the drug discovery timeline and cost. The prototype of VCT presented in this paper has not only demonstrated the capability of VCT but also identified problems that need to be addressed in the next cycle of development.