A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF MATHEMATICAL MODELS WITH TWO TRANSMISSION MODES FOR HIV DYNAMICS AND TREATMENT.

HIV can infect cells via cell-to-cell and virus-to-cell transmissions. These two types of transmission may occur in a combined way and enable viral spread. In this paper, we investigate analytically and numerically the influence of these two transmission modes, as well as the viral loss due to infection of T-cells. We introduce, analyze, and compare three mathematical models and show that viral loss due to infection of cells has little effect on the dynamics of HIV. Moreover, we show that additional conditions for the steady state stability are needed when virus-to-cell-transmission is included and a critical value for this parameter is provided. Numerical simulations illustrate the theoretical results and further investigate the differences between these systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]