A twofold usage of an agent-based model of vascular adaptation to design clinical experiments

Several computational models of Vein Graft Bypass (VGB) adaptation have been developed in order to improve the surgical outcome and they all share a common property: their accuracy relies on a winning choice of their driving coefficients which are best to be retrieved from experimental data. Since experiments are time-consuming and resources-demanding, the golden standard is to know in advance which measures need to be retrieved on the experimental table and out of how many samples. Accordingly, our goal is to build a computational framework able to pre-design an effective experimental structure to optimize the computational models setup. Our hypothesis is that an Agent-Based Model (ABM) developed by our group is comparable enough to a true set of experiments to be used to generate reliable virtual experimental data. Thanks to a twofold usage of our ABM, we created a filter to be posed before the real experiment in order to drive its optimal design. This work is the natural continuation of a previous study from our group [1], where the attention was posed on simple single-cellular events models. With this new version we focused on more complex models with the purpose of verifying that the complexity of the experimental setup grows proportionally with the accuracy of the model itself. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.