Physiologically Based Pharmacokinetic Modeling and Predictive Control

The barriers between systems engineering and medicine are slowly eroding as recently it has become evident that medicine has a lot to gain from systems technology. In particular, the drug administration problem can be cast as a control engineering problem, where the objective is to keep the drug concentration at certain organs in the body close to desired set-points. A number of constraints render the problem rather challenging. For example, hard constraints may be posed on drug concentration, because if it exceeds an upper limit, the effects of the drug are adverse and toxic. In this paper we show that a popular method in control engineering can be used for determining the optimal drug administration. Specifically, the Model Predictive Control (MPC) technology can be adopted for taking optimal decisions regarding regulation of drug concentration in the human body, while posing constraints on both drug concentration and drug infusion rate.