Section: Application Domains

Photodynamic therapy

Since 1988, some control system scientists and biologists at the CRAN (Centre de Recherche en Automatique de Nancy, http://www.cran.uhp-nancy.fr/francais/themes_rech/sbs/beam/index.php) have worked together to develop the photodynamic therapy (PDT in the sequel), an alternative treatment for cancer, by means of a model-based approach. The global aim in this direction is to use statistical as well as mechanistic models in order to improve the response reproducibility, help biologists and chemists in the design of new photosensitizing agents and provide insight into complex phenomena associated with oncogenesis, tumor angiogenesis and interactions with the treatment. This heavily relies on the production of accurate and simple enough models involving various type of stochastic processes, such as Markov chains, branching processes and stochastic differential equations. The main questions here concern generally identification or estimation properties, but simulation issues can be important too.