Simulation Optmization
Esophageal Cancer Simulator
Esophageal adenocarcinoma (EAC) is a main sub-type of esophageal cancer, while Barrett’s esophagus (BE) is a precursor to EAC (see the figure below). Recently, chemoprevention has received substantial attention as a method to lower the progression of BE to EAC, and aspirin and statin are two particular drugs that are demonstrated to be effective (Kastelein et al. 2011). For each BE patient, the progression rate to cancer depends on a variety of factors including age, weight, lifestyle habits such as smoking and alcohol use, the grade of dysplasia, etc. In addition, each patient may have a different response to drugs depending on his or her drug resistance and tolerance. Hence, it is conceivable that the best treatment regimen for BE is patient-specific.
Note:
Original Image
by Cancer Research UK / Wikimedia Commons /
CC BY-SA 4.0.
Here is a discrete-time Markov chain model adopted from Hur et al. (2004) and Choi et al. (2014) , and it simulates the transitions among different health states of a BE patient until death, and the transition diagram of the model is shown as follows. See more details of the model here.
I have implemented this model and the codes were written in MATLAB R2018b. They can be freely redistributed and used under the terms of the BSD 3-Clause License.
Download the codes with an example in it.
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Last Update: 2020-06-26