Utilizing Differential Evolution into optimizing targeted cancer treatments
This work addresses the challenge of designing effective cancer treatments through computational optimization, but it is incremental as it applies an existing DE method to a new simulation context.
The researchers tackled the problem of optimizing targeted drug delivery systems for cancer treatment by applying a Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm to a PhysiCell simulator, resulting in improved efficiency over a standard genetic algorithm that got stuck in local minima.
Working towards the development of an evolvable cancer treatment simulator, the investigation of Differential Evolution was considered, motivated by the high efficiency of variations of this technique in real-valued problems. A basic DE algorithm, namely "DE/rand/1" was used to optimize the simulated design of a targeted drug delivery system for tumor treatment on PhysiCell simulator. The suggested approach proved to be more efficient than a standard genetic algorithm, which was not able to escape local minima after a predefined number of generations. The key attribute of DE that enables it to outperform standard EAs, is the fact that it keeps the diversity of the population high, throughout all the generations. This work will be incorporated with ongoing research in a more wide applicability platform that will design, develop and evaluate targeted drug delivery systems aiming cancer tumours.