Optimal Control of Invasive Species with Budget Constraint: Qualitative Analysis and Numerical Approximation

The containment of the invasive species is a widespread problem in the environmental management, with a significant economic impact. We analyze an optimal control model which aims to find the best temporal resource allocation strategy for the removal of an invasive species. We derive the optimality system in the state and control variables and we use the phase-space analysis to provide qualitative insights about the behavior of the optimal solution.

Penetration of the blood-brain barrier and the anti-tumour effect of a novel PLGA-lysoGM1/DOX micelle drug delivery system

Effective treatment of glioma and other central nervous system (CNS) diseases is hindered by the presence of the blood-brain barrier (BBB). A novel nano-delivery vehicle system composed of PLGA-lysoGM1/DOX micelles was developed to cross the BBB for CNS treatment. We have shown that doxorubicin (DOX) as a model drug encapsulated in PLGA-lysoGM1 micelles can achieve up to 3.8% loading efficiency and 61.6% encapsulation efficiency by the orthogonal test design.

L-splines as diffusive limits of dissipative kinetic models

Dissipative kinetic models inspired by neutron transport are studied in a (1+1)-dimensional context: first, in the two-stream approximation, then in the general case of continuous velocities. Both are known to relax, in the diffusive scaling, toward a damped heat equation. Accordingly, it is shown that "uniformly accurate" L-splines discretizations of this parabolic asymptotic equation emerge from well-balanced schemes involving scattering S-matrices for the kinetic models.

On the limit as $s\to 0^+$ of fractional Orlicz-Sobolev spaces

An extended version of the Maz'ya-Shaposhnikova theorem on the limit as s -> 0+ of the Gagliardo-Slobodeckij fractional seminorm is established in the Orlicz space setting. Our result holds in fractional Orlicz-Sobolev spaces associated with Young functions satisfying the \Delta2-condition, and, as shown by counterexamples, it may fail if this condition is dropped.

Deep learning in systems medicine

Systems medicine (SM) has emerged as a powerful tool for studying the human body at the systems level with the aim of improving our understanding, prevention and treatment of complex diseases. Being able to automatically extract relevant features needed for a given task from high-dimensional, heterogeneous data, deep learning (DL) holds great promise in this endeavour. This review paper addresses the main developments of DL algorithms and a set of general topics where DL is decisive, namely, within the SM landscape.

Analysis of a model for waterborne diseases with Allee effect on bacteria

A limitation of current modeling studies in waterborne diseases (one of the leading causes of death worldwide) is that the intrinsic dynamics of the pathogens is poorly addressed, leading to incomplete, and often, inadequate understanding of the pathogen evolution and its impact on disease transmission and spread. To overcome these limitations, in this paper, we consider an ODEs model with bacterial growth inducing Allee effect. We adopt an adequate functional response to significantly express the shape of indirect transmission.