Optimal scheduling of low-dose metronomic chemotherapy: an in-silico analysis

Low-dose metronomic (LDM) chemotherapy shows promising results in cancer treatment. However, the scheduling of the therapy, including the determination of the optimal biologic dose is usually based on empiricism. This paper contributes to an in-silico analysis targeting parameter optimization of LDM chemotherapy design. The in-treatment tumor growth model used by the analysis formulates tumor proliferation and necrosis, dead tumor cell washout, as well as pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of the administered drug. The model parameters are identified based on mouse experiments. The optimization goal is the minimization of the total amount of drug delivered throughout the full length of the therapy with governing constraints ensuring the efficacy of the treatment. Results show that a clear optimum exists in the scheduling of the treatments, that is, an optimal choice for the rest periods can be done. The optimum is independent of the length of the therapy, and only slightly depends on the parameter sets of the individual patients

Automated and Secure Onboarding for System of Systems

The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly changing the number of connected devices and the way they interact with each other. This increases the need for an automated and secure onboarding procedure for IoT devices, systems and services. Device manufacturers are entering the market with internet connected devices, ranging from small sensors to production devices, which are subject of security threats specific to IoT. The onboarding procedure is required to introduce a new device in a System of Systems (SoS) without compromising the already onboarded devices and the underlying infrastructure. Onboarding is the process of providing access to the network and registering the components for the first time in an IoT/SoS framework, thus creating a chain of trust from the hardware device to its hosted software systems and their provided services. The large number and diversity of device hardware, software systems and running services raises the challenge to establish a generic onboarding procedure. In this paper, we present an automated and secure onboarding procedure for SoS. We have implemented the onboarding procedure in the Eclipse Arrowhead framework. However, it can be easily adapted for other IoT/SoS frameworks that are based on Service-oriented Architecture (SoA) principles. The automated onboarding procedure ensures a secure and trusted communication between the new IoT devices and the Eclipse Arrowhead framework. We show its application in a smart charging use case and perform a security assessment