Refine
Document Type
- Article (1)
- ZIB-Report (1)
Language
- English (2)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (2)
Institute
- Numerical Mathematics (1)
- ZIB Allgemein (1)
{\def\xnew{x^{\mbox{\tiny new}}}\def\Z{{{\rm Z}\!\! Z}}For every fixed set ${\cal F}\subseteq\{0,1\}^n$ the following problems are strongly polynomial time equivalent: given a feasible point $x\in\cal F$ and a linear objective function $c\in\Z^n$, \begin{itemize} \item find a feasible point $x^*\in\cal F$ that maximizes $cx$ (Optimization), \item find a feasible point $\xnew\in\cal F$ with $c\xnew>cx$ (Augmentation), and \item find a feasible point $\xnew\in\cal F$ with $c\xnew>cx$ such that $\xnew-x$ is ``irreducible''\\(Irreducible Augmentation). \end{itemize} This generalizes results and techniques that are well known for $0/1$--integer programming problems that arise from various classes of combinatorial optimization problems.}
Based on experimental drug concentration profiles in healthy as well as tape-stripped ex vivo human skin, we model the penetration of the antiinflammatory drug dexamethasone into the skin layers by the one-dimensional generalized diffusion equation. We estimate the position-dependent free-energy and diffusivity profiles by solving the conjugated minimization problem, in which the only inputs are concentration profiles of dexamethasone in skin at three consecutive penetration times. The resulting free-energy profiles for damaged and healthy skin show only minor differences. In contrast, the drug diffusivity in the first 10 μm of the upper skin layer of damaged skin is 200-fold increased compared to healthy skin, which reflects the corrupted barrier function of tape-stripped skin. For the case of healthy skin, we examine the robustness of our method by analyzing the behavior of the extracted skin parameters when the number of input and output parameters are reduced. We also discuss techniques for the regularization of our parameter extraction method.