Modeling of Tumor Growth: An Incremental Development Framework

Cancer is a disease that is being extensively studied for half a century from numerous aspects and by researchers from varied fields including Medicine, Biology, Chemistry, Psychology, Engineering, Mathematics and more. A crucial base of these is the study of how tumors form, grow and become cancerous. The growth and spread of tumors, when charted, often follow the graphs of simple functions of time, and many mathematical models have been proposed to track these phenomena. This paper presents a short systematic description of the popular models in literature for a control engineering audience. The models are presented progressively with increasing complexity and a framework is developed to utilize this progression as a pedagogical tool for acquiring concepts of control systems. System modelling and analysis topics are mapped to the various models of tumor growth and a comparative analysis is presented through simulation results.