Long time dynamics of a phase-field model of prostate cancer growth with chemotherapy and antiangiogenic therapy effects

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the long-term behavior of a prostate cancer growth model incorporating chemotherapy and antiangiogenic therapy, proving the existence of a global attractor and convergence to stationary states.

Contribution

It establishes the mathematical well-posedness and long-time dynamics of a complex phase-field model of prostate cancer with therapeutic effects.

Findings

Existence of a strongly continuous semigroup for the model

Presence of a global attractor in the phase space

Convergence of solutions to stationary states with rate estimates

Abstract

We consider a phase-field model of prostate cancer growth with chemotherapy and antiangiogenic therapy effects which is introduced in [2]. It is comprised of phase-field equation to describe tumor growth, which is coupled to a reaction-diffusion type equation for generic nutrient for the tumor. An additional equation couples the concentration of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) in the prostatic tissue and it obeys a linear reaction-diffusion equation. The system completes with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions for the tumor variable and Neuman boundary condition for the nutrient and the concentration of PSA. Here we investigate the long time dynamics of the model. We first prove that the initial-boundary value problem generates a strongly continuous semigroup on a suitable phase space that admits the global attractor in a proper phase space. Moreover, we also discuss the convergence of a solution to a single stationary state and obtain a convergence rate estimate under some conditions on the coefficients.