Yannis Paschalidis
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Division of Systems Engineering
Boston University Boston, MA, USA
Email: [email protected]
Abstract
In this talk I will outline our recent work on modeling and controlling the effects of Bivalirudin. Bivalirudin is a direct thrombin inhibitor (a blood thinner) and is used in cardiac surgical patients who develop an allergic reaction to heparin. Since it is a rarely used drug, clinical experience with its dosing is sparse. We have developed two approaches that predict the Partial Thromboplastin Time (PTT) based on the past infusion rates of bivalirudin. The first approach is model-free and utilizes regularized regression. The second approach is model-based and proposes a specific dynamic model for PTT. We learn population-wide model parameters by solving a nonlinear optimization problem. We also devise an adaptive algorithm based on the extended Kalman filter that can adapt model parameters to individual patients. The latter adaptive model emerges as the most promising as it yields almost identical mean error compared to the model-free approach but at a much reduced per-patient variance. The model accuracy we demonstrate on actual patient measurements is sufficient to be useful in guiding optimal therapy. We further use the model to develop an adaptive control approach that can automatically control the bivalirudin infusion rate to achieve a given PTT target value.
Biography
Yannis Paschalidis is a Professor and Distinguished Faculty Fellow of Electrical and Computer and of Systems Engineering at Boston University, and a Co-Director of the Center for Information and Systems Engineering (CISE). He obtained a Diploma (1991) from the National Technical University of Athens, and an M.S. (1993) and a Ph.D. (1996) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), all in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. In September 1996 he joined Boston University where he has been ever since. His current research interests lie in the fields systems and control, networking, applied probability, optimization, operations research, computational biology, medical informatics, and bioinformatics. His recent work has found applications in communication and sensor networks, protein docking, metabolic networks, logistics, cyber-security, robotics, the smart-grid, health care, and finance. Prof. Paschalidis’ work on communication and sensor networks has been recognized with a CAREER award (2000) from the National Science Foundation, the second prize in the 1997 George E. Nicholson paper competition by INFORMS, and the best student paper award at the 9th Intl. Symposium of Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad Hoc, and Wireless Networks (WiOpt 2011) won by one of his Ph.D. students for a joint paper. His work on protein docking has been recognized by a 1st prize in the Protein Interaction Evaluation Meeting (2007) and a recognition (with his collaborators) for best performance in modeling selected protein-protein complexes against 64 other predictor groups (2009 Protein Interaction Evaluation Meeting). He was an invited participant at the 2002 Frontiers of Engineering Symposium organized by the National Academy of Engineering. He has served in the program and organizing committees of numerous conferences and has been in the editorial board of several journals. He currently is the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Trans. on Network Systems.
