Modified fractional order IMC design based drug scheduling for cancer treatment

This paper aims to improve chemotherapy drug(s) scheduling of the drug dose injected into a patient. The existing practice has been established on experiments performed during the drug development process. In general, chemotherapeutic drugs are highly toxic in nature and directly affect the probability of a patient's survival. Therefore, a modified fractional order internal model control (MFOIMC) scheme with a minimal number of design parameters is proposed for effective drug scheduling. The proposed control scheme is a combination of fractional calculus and IMC. The fractional order IMC (FOIMC) is modified by incorporating an extra control loop with a proportional transfer function. Further, IPD and IMC control techniques are also designed for comparative analysis. The dragon fly algorithm (DA) is employed to optimize the parameters of the controller. Results show that the proposed control scheme provides a continuous and precise chemotherapeutic drug dose to the patient on a daily basis. It is also shown that MFOIMC improves IAE by 34% and 32% in comparison to IMC and FOIMC, respectively, which proves its superiority over other controllers.