Guest Editorial - Special Issue on Systems and Control Problems in Medicine

The papers that are collected here are representative of the work that is ongoing at the interface between control and medicine. There are of course many areas that are not represented and we apologize to those whose areas are not profiled. One of the main sets of work that is missing is the work that is being done on the modeling and control of specific organ systems and structures. For example, we were not able to obtain a paper in computational neuroscience even though the field is very closely connected to control theory. Thus, for example, there is no paper on the vestibular system, on the neural control of movement, or for that matter, on problems that involve modeling and control of cells, neurons, and muscles. Interacting with the medical community, we have observed that a major problem is that physicians have a very different idea of what a model should accomplish than do engineers and mathematicians. Again, this is an area that requires education from both sides.We do not feel that we have accomplished everything with this one issue. For example, we would have liked to include a survey paper on the interface between control theory, biology, and medicine. This special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control lacks such a paper. We therefore view this special issue as a beginning, not as an end in itself, and feel that this issue is important for what it contains not for what is missing. We have collected eight very solid papers that range from the control of epidemics, to artificial organs, to biomechanics, and to the development of tools needed for the application of control to medicine. By reading these papers, one can begin to understand what is happening on the interface between control and medicine. To understand more completely, one must delve deeper into the literature, and more importantly, join the already sizable group of control theorists who are working with applications of control to medicine.