Exploration of Hepatitis B Virus Infection Dynamics through Physics-Informed Deep Learning Approach

Accurate forecasting of viral disease outbreaks is crucial for guiding public health responses and preventing widespread loss of life. In recent years, Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have emerged as a promising framework that can capture the intricate dynamics of viral infection and reliably predict its future progression. However, despite notable advances, the application of PINNs in disease modeling remains limited. Standard PINNs are effective in simulating disease dynamics through forward modeling but often face challenges in estimating key biological parameters from sparse or noisy experimental data when applied in an inverse framework. To overcome these limitations, a recent extension known as Disease Informed Neural Networks (DINNs) has emerged, offering a more robust approach to parameter estimation tasks. In this work, we apply this DINNs technique on a recently proposed hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection dynamics model to predict infection transmission within the liver. This model consists of four compartments: uninfected and infected hepatocytes, rcDNA-containing capsids, and free viruses. Leveraging the power of DINNs, we study the impacts of (i) variations in parameter range, (ii) experimental noise in data, (iii) sample sizes, (iv) network architecture and (v) learning rate. We employ this methodology in experimental data collected from nine HBV-infected chimpanzees and observe that it reliably estimates the model parameters. DINNs can capture infection dynamics and predict their future progression even when data of some compartments of the system are missing. Additionally, it identifies the influential model parameters that determine whether the HBV infection is cleared or persists within the host.