PhysiCell Validation of a Discrete-in-Continuous Mathematical Model for Cancer-on-Chip Experiments

Cancer-on-Chip devices provide controlled microfluidic envi-ronments for studying the interaction between tumour and immune cells through microscopy and cell-tracking data. Here, we consider a Hybrid discrete-in-continuous model in which a reaction–diffusion equa-tion (PDEs) describes the chemoattractant field, while immune cells are represented individually as ordinary differential equations (ODEs) that migrate under chemotactic forces, short-range mechanical interac-tions and substrate-induced damping. Tumour cells are static and act as localised sources of chemoattractant. In order to get dense and clean data, we assess the model against a reference dataset simulated with the agent-based platform PhysiCell, configured on the same domain and boundary conditions as our model.Afteratrainingphaseonadatasetlimitedtoarestrictedtemporalwindow,theHybridmodelwassuccess-fullyvalidatedagainstPhysiCellsyntheticdataasbenchmark.Numericalresultsshowthatthemaincollectivemigrationpatternsobservedinthereferencesimulationsarerecoveredandthemodelisabletopredictthelater-timedynamicswithgoodaccuracy.