Sensitivity Analysis Of An In Silico Model Of Tumor Growth And Radiation Response.

Simulating the response to radiotherapy (RT) in cancer patients may help devising new therapeutic strategies. Computational models make it possible to cope with the multi-scale biological mechanisms characterising this group of diseases. We present in this paper an in silico model of tumour growth and radiation response, capable of simulating a whole RT protocol of prostate cancer. Oxygen diffusion, proliferation of tumour cells, angiogenesis based on the VEGF diffusion, oxygen-dependent response to irradiation and resorption of dead cells were implemented in a multi-scale framework. A sensitivity analysis using the Morris screening method was performed on 21 computational tissues, initialised from prostate histopathological specimens presenting different tumour and vascular densities. The dose per fraction and the duration of the cycle of tumour cells were identified as the most important parameters of the model.