Department of Electrical Engineering, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Islamabad, Pakistan.
IET Syst Biol. 2021 Apr;15(2):53-71. doi: 10.1049/syb2.12014.
Hepatitis C is the liver disease caused by the Hepatitis C virus (HCV) which can lead to serious health problems such as liver cancer. In this research work, the non-linear model of HCV having three state variables (uninfected hepatocytes, infected hepatocytes and virions) and two control inputs has been taken into account, and four non-linear controllers namely non-linear PID controller, Lyapunov Redesign controller, Synergetic controller and Fuzzy Logic-Based controller have been proposed to control HCV infection inside the human body. The controllers have been designed for the anti-viral therapy in order to control the amount of uninfected hepatocytes to the desired safe limit and to track the amount of infected hepatocytes and virions to their reference value which is zero. One control input is the Pegylated interferon (peg-IFN-α) which acts in reducing the infected hepatocytes and the other input is ribavirin which blocks the production of virions. By doing so, the uninfected hepatocytes increase and achieve the required safe limit. Lyapunov stability analysis has been used to prove the stability of the whole system. The comparative analysis of the proposed nonlinear controllers using MATLAB/Simulink have been done with each other and with linear PID. These results depict that the infected hepatocytes and virions are reduced to the desired level, enhancing the rate of sustained virologic response (SVR) and reducing the treatment period as compared with previous strategies introduced in the literature.
丙型肝炎是由丙型肝炎病毒（HCV）引起的肝脏疾病，可导致严重的健康问题，如肝癌。在这项研究工作中，考虑了具有三个状态变量（未感染的肝细胞、感染的肝细胞和病毒）和两个控制输入的 HCV 的非线性模型，并提出了四种非线性控制器，即非线性 PID 控制器、Lyapunov 重新设计控制器、协同控制器和基于模糊逻辑的控制器，以控制人体内的 HCV 感染。这些控制器是为抗病毒治疗而设计的，旨在将未感染的肝细胞数量控制在所需的安全限度内，并将感染的肝细胞和病毒数量跟踪到其参考值零。一个控制输入是聚乙二醇干扰素（peg-IFN-α），它可以减少感染的肝细胞，另一个输入是利巴韦林，它可以阻止病毒的产生。这样，未感染的肝细胞就会增加，并达到所需的安全限度。使用 Lyapunov 稳定性分析证明了整个系统的稳定性。使用 MATLAB/Simulink 对提出的非线性控制器进行了相互比较和与线性 PID 的比较分析。这些结果表明，与文献中介绍的以前的策略相比，感染的肝细胞和病毒数量减少到所需水平，提高了持续病毒学应答（SVR）的速度，并缩短了治疗期。
