Oncolytic virotherapy is known as a new treatment to employ less virulent viruses to specifically target and damage cancer cells. This work presents a cellular automata model of oncolytic virotherapy with an application to pancreatic cancer. The fundamental biomedical processes (like cell proliferation, mutation, apoptosis) are modeled by the use of probabilistic principles. The migration of injected viruses (as therapy) is modeled by diffusion through the tissue. The resulting diffusion–reaction equation with smoothed point viral sources is discretized by the finite difference method and integrated by the IMEX approach. Furthermore, Monte Carlo simulations are done to quantitatively evaluate the correlations between various input parameters and numerical results. As we expected, our model is able to simulate the pancreatic cancer growth at early stages, which is calibrated with experimental results. In addition, the model can be used to predict and evaluate the therapeutic effect of oncolytic virotherapy.

中文翻译：

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胰腺癌溶瘤病毒治疗的细胞自动机模型

溶瘤病毒疗法被称为一种新的治疗方法，它使用毒性较低的病毒来特异性靶向和破坏癌细胞。这项工作提出了一种应用于胰腺癌的溶瘤病毒疗法的细胞自动机模型。基本的生物医学过程（如细胞增殖、突变、细胞凋亡）是通过使用概率原理建模的。注射病毒的迁移（作为治疗）是通过组织扩散来模拟的。得到的具有平滑点病毒源的扩散反应方程通过有限差分方法离散，并通过 IMEX 方法进行积分。此外，还进行了蒙特卡罗模拟以定量评估各种输入参数与数值结果之间的相关性。正如我们所料，我们的模型能够模拟早期阶段的胰腺癌生长，并通过实验结果进行校准。此外，该模型可用于预测和评估溶瘤病毒疗法的治疗效果。