Optimal control strategies for preventing hepatitis B infection and reducing chronic liver cirrhosis incidence

Advanced liver cirrhosis has become life-threatening among non-communicable diseases nowadays. Cirrhosis, the terminal stage of liver diseases in which the liver develops scarring as a result of various long-term continuous damages. Among liver diseases, viral hepatitis is the major risk factor for chronic cirrhosis development. The present paper demonstrates a compartmental model of chronic disease liver cirrhosis describing the transmission dynamics of this disease. Applying the Pontryagin's maximum principle, the optimal control policies such as vaccination for hepatitis B virus and treatment of other causes of cirrhosis are adopted as control measures. The target of this study is to minimize the number of infected and liver cirrhotic individuals as well as the associated cost of the control. For this purpose, the optimal control strategies are employed according to the underlying causes behind this disease. Our goal is to find the strategy of preventing hepatitis B infection which is considered one of the leading causes of cirrhosis and consequently, reduction of the chronic cirrhosis incidence. Efficiency analysis is also performed to observe the effective control among the two control strategies. The model is investigated both analytically and numerically and the numerical simulations are carried out to illustrate the analytical findings. The analysis reveals that both the vaccination and treatment could be the most fruitful way to reduce the incidence of chronic liver cirrhosis. (c) 2019 The Authors. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co., Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).