Publication: A mathematical model of thyroid disease response to radiotherapy
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2021-10-01
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MDPI
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Abstract
We present a mechanistic biomathematical model of molecular radiotherapy of thyroid
disease. The general model consists of a set of differential equations describing the dynamics of
different populations of thyroid cells with varying degrees of damage caused by radiotherapy
(undamaged cells, sub-lethally damaged cells, doomed cells, and dead cells), as well as the dynamics
of thyroglobulin and antithyroglobulin autoantibodies, which are important surrogates of treatment
response. The model is presented in two flavours: on the one hand, as a deterministic continuous
model, which is useful to fit populational data, and on the other hand, as a stochastic Markov model,
which is particularly useful to investigate tumor control probabilities and treatment individualization.
The model was used to fit the response dynamics (tumor/thyroid volumes, thyroglobulin and
antithyroglobulin autoantibodies) observed in experimental studies of thyroid cancer and Graves’
disease treated with 131I-radiotherapy. A qualitative adequate fitting of the model to the experimental
data was achieved. We also used the model to investigate treatment individualization strategies for
differentiated thyroid cancer, aiming to improve the tumor control probability. We found that simple
individualization strategies based on the absorbed dose in the tumor and tumor radiosensitivity
(which are both magnitudes that can potentially be individually determined for every patient) can
lead to an important raise of tumor control probabilities.
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Keywords
Mathematical model, Radiobiology, Radioiodine therapy, Thyroid
Bibliographic citation
Gago-Arias, A.; Neira, S.; Terragni, F.; Pardo-Montero, J. A Mathematical Model of Thyroid Disease Response to Radiotherapy. Mathematics 2021, 9, 2365.