Pascal Ballet, Vincent Rodin and Jacques Tisseau.
A multiagent system to model and simulate in-vitro experimentations.
ISAS'98, IIIS 4th International Conference on Information Systems, Analysis and Synthesis, volume 2, pages 1-7, Orlando (USA), 12-16 July 1998.
Abstract:
The models of immune mechanisms which can be simulated on computers are numerous. They can be based on a mathematical approach and mainly on differential equations. For this global approach, the problem is to determine the influence of a cell population on an other cell population. This approach is particularly well adapted to the in-vivo phenomena simulation. In this case, the number of cells taken into account is very important (n > 1012).
Another model consists in the local description of a cell's behavior, and in the description of its receptors. The simulation manages to determine interactions between the cells. Therefore, global phenomena are seen as the emergence of all the individual interactions.
This last approach started in the early nineties with the work of Forrest on the receptor description and Seiden & Celada on the humoral response and thymus activity. The main advantages of such an approach are the modularity and its incremental aspect. The modularity allows a quite simple addition or removal of agents. The incremental aspect is the ability to easily improve the cell-agent model.
This is the reason why the studies have been quickly extended by Smith on vaccine efficacy, by Seiden's team on rheumatoid factors and Ballet on humoral response against HIV virus... By now, these models have no geometrical constraints.
Therefore we have decided to develop a multiagent system doted with geometrical constraints. Thus, we are able to simulate in-vitro experimentations into which the geometrical aspect is important. Thanks to the simple geometrical restraints, this study demonstrates that it is possible to simulate several in-vitro experimentations. We present in this paper our simulator and three in-machina experimentations. Each of them are compared with the real in-vitro test.
Keywords: Multiagent system, Immunology, Simulation, Immunodosage, Immun complex, B-CD5 Cell.
[Ballet98b.pdf]