Optimising Antibiotic Treatments with Multi-objective Population-based Algorithms

Abstract

Antibiotic resistance is one of the major challenges that we are facing today. The frequent overuse of antibiotics is one of the main reasons for the development of resistance. A mathematical model of bacterial population dynamics is used, where drug administration and absorption mechanics are implemented to evaluate the fitness of automatically designed treatments. To maximise the probability of curing the host while minimising the total drug used we have explored treatments with different daily dosages and lengths. Two multi-objective population-based methods, a well-known evolutionary algorithm and a particle swarm optimisation algorithm are tuned and contrasted when solving the posed treatment design problem. The best solutions found by our approach suggest treatments ranging from five to seven days with a high initial dose, followed by lower doses, use lower amounts of the drug than the standard common practice of fixed daily dosages over ten days.