Related papers: Optimizing antimicrobial treatment schedules: some…
Antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) is critical in pediatric intensive care units (PICUs), where diagnostic uncertainty often drives broad-spectrum antibiotic use, increasing antimicrobial resistance and potential long-term harms. Machine…
Some microbial organisms are known to randomly slip into and out of hibernation, irrespective of environmental conditions [1]. In a (genetically) uniform population a typically very small subpopulation becomes metabolically inactive whereas…
Antimicrobial protocols - using substances such as antibiotics or disinfectants - remain the preferred option for preventing the spread of pathogenic bacteria. However, bacteria can develop mechanisms to reduce their antimicrobial…
The effects of molecularly targeted drug perturbations on cellular activities and fates are difficult to predict using intuition alone because of the complex behaviors of cellular regulatory networks. An approach to overcoming this problem…
Although optimal control theory has been used for the theoretical study of anti-cancerous drugs scheduling optimization, with the aim of reducing the primary tumor volume, the effect on metastases is often ignored. Here, we use a previously…
The tolerance of bacterial populations to biocidal or antibiotic treatment has been well documented in both biofilm and planktonic settings. However, there is still very little known about the mechanisms that produce this tolerance.…
Many drugs used therapeutically or recreationally induce tolerance: the effect of the substance decreases with repeated use. This phenomenon may reduce the efficacy of the substance unless dosage is increased beyond what is healthy for the…
A mathematical model for time development of metastases and their distribution in size and carrying capacity is presented. The model is used to theoretically investigate anti-cancer therapies such as surgery and chemical treatments…
The application of existing methods for constructing optimal dynamic treatment regimes is limited to cases where investigators are interested in optimizing a utility function over a fixed period of time (finite horizon). In this manuscript,…
Suppose that we intend to perform an experiment consisting of a set of independent trials. The mean value of the response of each trial is assumed to be equal to the sum of the effect of the treatment selected for the trial, and some…
Identifying optimal medical treatments to improve survival has long been a critical goal of pharmacoepidemiology. Traditionally, we use an average treatment effect measure to compare outcomes between treatment plans. However, new methods…
Antimicrobial resistance is a threat to public health with millions of deaths linked to drug resistant infections every year. To mitigate resistance, common strategies that are used are combination therapies and therapy switching. However,…
We propose a mathematical model of Antimicrobial Resistance in the host to predict the failure of two antagonists of bacterial growth: the immune response and a single-antibiotic therapy. After characterising the initial bacterial load that…
Antibiotics are a vital class of drugs closely associated with the prevention and treatment of bacterial infections. Accurate prediction of molecular antimicrobial activity remains a key challenge in the pursuit of novel antibiotic…
We consider the optimal design problem for identifying effective dose combinations within drug combination studies where the effect of the combination of two drugs is investigated. Drug combination studies are becoming increasingly…
We consider the optimal appointment scheduling problem that incorporates patients' unpunctual behavior, where the unpunctuality is assumed to be time dependent, but additive. Our goal is to develop an optimal scheduling method for a large…
We apply optimal control theory to a tuberculosis model given by a system of ordinary differential equations. Optimal control strategies are proposed to minimize the cost of interventions, considering reinfection and post-exposure…
Dynamic treatment regimes are of growing interest across the clinical sciences as these regimes provide one way to operationalize and thus inform sequential personalized clinical decision making. A dynamic treatment regime is a sequence of…
Over the past decade, several targeted therapies (e.g. imatinib, dasatinib, nilotinib) have been developed to treat Chronic Myeloid Leukemia (CML). Despite an initial response to therapy, drug resistance remains a problem for some CML…
A/B testing is critical for modern technological companies to evaluate the effectiveness of newly developed products against standard baselines. This paper studies optimal designs that aim to maximize the amount of information obtained from…