Publication of agent-based model to simulate patterns of melanocytic proliferations passes peer-review
dwh GmbH is proud to announce the acceptance of the paper “Reproduction of patterns in melanocytic proliferations by agent-based simulation and geometric modeling” in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS Computational Biology.
The paper, a cooperation with Medical University of Vienna, TU Wien and DEXHELPP, describes the agent-based model that was developed for simulating of the emergence of biologic patterns in melanocytic skin proliferations (nevi and melanoma). The approach combines a geometric model of the microphysiology with abstracted cell behavior to reproduce the visual appearance of simulated skin lesions analogous to clinical imagery and visual diagnosis methods.
Until now, clinicians and pathologists use pigmentation patterns to classify melanocytic nevi into subgroups and to differentiate nevi from melanoma. But the mechanisms that produce these patterns are poorly understood. Our simulations confirm existing assumptions about nest formation in melanocytic lesions and offer new insights and testable hypotheses for important biologic phenomena such as senescence and tumor progression. Furthermore, synthetic nevi created by our model may serve as training cases for machine learning algorithms.