An Agent-based System Model to Support Cardiac Tissue Engineering: Preliminary Results

摘要

As biomedical research advances to address increasingly complex, multi-factorial problems, it approaches a point where individual abductive reasoning alone may not serve to develop plausible and testable hypotheses. The need for computational simulation and prediction of multi-cellular events in space and time then becomes apparent. Multi-agent system (MAS) simulation is a challenging and promising method in support of that quest. With the precise aim of designing software analogues able to simulate cardiac cell culture phenomena in response to specific experimental interventions, a MAS approach was used to instantiate an in silico model. Initial face and phenomenological validation focused on the formation of embryoid bodies under different culture conditions starting from single embryonic stem cells. These early results support the feasibility of such models facilitating practice in cardiac tissue engineering.