AUTONOMOUS NANO-ROBOTICS SYSTEM FOR CANCER TREATMENT

Abstract

A significant problem in cancer treatment using chemotherapy is the strong toxic side effects of this therapy on healthy tissues. These side effects lead to dose reduction and treatment delay or discontinuity. It is so difficult to limit these side effects on healthy organs and to strength drug efficiency to cancer cells. In order to avoid these side effects, researchers have developed a lot of strategies to deliver anticancer drugs into only the tumor cells using Nano-robots. Nano-robot is a programmable and controllable Nano scale robot, which is used to perform specific tasks in the microscopic world. Nano-robots are designed to work with precision at Nano scale dimensions. They provide many novel capabilities because of their ability to sense and act in microscopic environments. To perform cancer treatment on a cellular level, Nano-robots are injected into the human body and then start their journey in the blood vessels. They try to reach the cancer area and then release drugs to destroy cancer cells. During their journey, they may encounter immune system cells as obstacles. So, they need an appropriate strategy for avoiding and escaping from such obstacles. This thesis firstly proposes a modified algorithm for delivering a swarm of Nano-robots to the tumor micro-environment. This algorithm is called Directed Particle Swarm Optimization (DPSO). Simulated experiments showed the efficiency and the power of this modified algorithm. In these experiments, DPSO was compared with four other algorithms, and the results showed that DPSO can deliver 94% of the swarm after only 10 iterations, while the other algorithms can deliver only 70% after the same number of iterations. So, when using DPSO, the number of iterations needed to deliver the whole swarm to the target area is reduced. Also, DPSO can guarantee the reachability of the target area by all Nano-robots.