The many faces of mathematical modelling in oncology

Abstract

The application of modelling to solve problems in biology and medicine, and specifically in oncology and radiation therapy, is increasingly established and holds big promise. We provide an overview of the basic concepts of the field and its current state, along with new tools available and future directions for research. We will outline radiobiology models, examples of other anticancer therapy models, multiscale modelling, and we will discuss mechanistic and phenomenological approaches to modelling.

Figure 1.

The cycle of designing and refining a model (on the right, blue lines in the online version), and then using it to generate new hypotheses (on the left, purple lines in the online version) is shown.

Figure 2.

Phenomenological and mechanistic approaches to biological modelling, with their strengths and shortcomings.

Figure 3.

Overview of the main characteristics of our recently proposed spatially aware modelling framework. 3D, three-dimensional.

Figure 4.

A pipeline for using multiscale tumour models to decide the best therapy for a given patient profile, and the cycle that involves monitoring patient response to treatment, the gathering of new data and the refitting of the model accordingly, so to make the therapy adapt to the tumour evolution.