An optimal immune therapy protocol under chemotherapy regime in non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma treatment

Abstract

Cytotoxic drugs in chemotherapy regime for treating the blood cancer may cause a neutropenic period, and depending on the proposed treatment protocol a period of 14–21 days is needed for blood cells recovery. In this paper, an algorithm is proposed to optimize the post-chemotherapy treatment protocol by reducing both the recovery period and the nadir duration. Mathematical model of the chemotherapy effects enables us to optimize the recovery period under granulocyte colony stimulating factor (G-CSF) support. Because the blood system has a nonlinear behavior in nature, the genetic algorithm as a soft computing intelligence approach is used to optimize the time schedule and the quantity of the immune drugs. It is shown that, the period of 10 days immunotherapy of standard CHOP-14 is reduced to 6 days for young patients and 8 days for elderly patients. In addition, the recovery period in standard CHOP-14 is reduced from 14 to 12 days by optimizing the G-CSF as the control input system. By applying the optimized recovery protocol especially in the young patients, the leukocyte counts will never go to nadir condition and in elderly patients there is a valuable reduction in the nadir duration. Moreover, the G-CSF dose in optimized protocol is decreased up to 10 % of its normal dose of 4 μg/kg of body mass in some injections.