@ARTICLE{BCEGS08,
  title = {{CellExcite: An Efficient Simulation Environment for Excitable Cells}},
  author = {Bartocci, Ezio and Corradini, Flavio and Entcheva, Emilia and Grosu, Radu and Smolka, Scott A.},
  journal = {BMC Bioinformatics},
  pages = {S1-S13},
  abstract = {<br>
      <b>Background</b>
      <br>
      Brain, heart and skeletal muscle share similar properties of excitable tissue,
      featuring both discrete behavior (all-or-nothing response to electrical
      activation) and continuous behavior (recovery to rest follows a temporal path,
      determined by multiple competing ion flows). Classical mathematical models of
      excitable cells involve complex systems of nonlinear differential equations.
      Such models not only impair formal analysis but also impose high computational
      demands on simulations, especially in large-scale 2-D and 3-D cell networks. In
      this paper, we show that by choosing Hybrid Automata as the modeling formalism,
      it is possible to construct a more abstract model of excitable cells that
      preserves the properties of interest while reducing the computational effort,
      thereby admitting the possibility of formal analysis and efficient simulation.
      <br>
      <b>Results</b>
      <br>
      We have developed CellExcite, a sophisticated simulation environment for
      excitable-cell networks. CellExcite allows the user to sketch a tissue of
      excitable cells, plan the stimuli to be applied during simulation, and
      customize the diffusion model. CellExcite adopts Hybrid Automata (HA) as the
      computational model in order to efficiently capture both discrete and
      continuous excitable-cell behavior.
      <br>
      <b>Conclusions</b>
      <br>
      The CellExcite simulation framework for multicellular HA arrays exhibits
      significantly improved computational efficiency in large-scale simulations,
      thus opening the possibility for formal analysis based on HA theory. A demo of
      CellExcite is available at http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~eha/},
  volume = {9},
  number = {Suppl. 2},
  year = {2008},
  url = {http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1471-2105-9-S2-S3.pdf},
}