Antiviral therapy using a fuzzy controller optimized by modified evolutionary algorithms: a comparative study

Hepatitis is usually caused by a viral infection or metabolic diseases. Hepatitis type B virus (HBV) infection is among the most common causes of hepatitis and can result in serious liver diseases. Several dynamic models have been developed to mathematically describe the HBV infection and antiviral therapy. In addition, different control strategies have been reported in the literature to deal with optimal antiviral therapy problem of infectious diseases. In this paper, a set of optimized closed-loop fuzzy controllers are employed for optimal treatment of basic HBV infection. To optimize the proposed scheme, five modified and modern optimization algorithms are investigated. After designing the controller, some parameters of the HBV infection model are considered to be unknown, and the robustness of the optimized controller is studied. Experimental results show that the covariance matrix adaptation–evolution strategy-based optimized closed-loop fuzzy controller has the best performance in terms of total cost of an objective function defined based on maximization of uninfected target cells, minimization of free HBVs and minimization of drug usage. In addition, the execution time of this optimization algorithm is only 8 % more than the execution time of imperialist competition algorithm as the investigated algorithm with the best convergence speed.