Multiscale Bone Remodelling with Spatial P Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multiscale modeling approach for biological phenomena, specifically bone remodelling, using Spatial P systems, which are a geometric variant of P systems that incorporate spatial information.

Contribution

The paper formalizes a Spatial P system framework for multiscale modeling, rephrasing the Complex Automata approach and demonstrating its application to bone remodelling.

Findings

The model accurately captures multiscale bone remodelling dynamics.

Spatial P systems offer a highly faithful and expressive formalism for multiscale biological modeling.

Highlights the need for further formal expressiveness studies comparing different multiscale approaches.

Abstract

Many biological phenomena are inherently multiscale, i.e. they are characterized by interactions involving different spatial and temporal scales simultaneously. Though several approaches have been proposed to provide "multilayer" models, only Complex Automata, derived from Cellular Automata, naturally embed spatial information and realize multiscaling with well-established inter-scale integration schemas. Spatial P systems, a variant of P systems in which a more geometric concept of space has been added, have several characteristics in common with Cellular Automata. We propose such a formalism as a basis to rephrase the Complex Automata multiscaling approach and, in this perspective, provide a 2-scale Spatial P system describing bone remodelling. The proposed model not only results to be highly faithful and expressive in a multiscale scenario, but also highlights the need of a deep and formal expressiveness study involving Complex Automata, Spatial P systems and other promising multiscale approaches, such as our shape-based one already resulted to be highly faithful.