CELL-KINETICS BASED CALIBRATION OF A MULTISCALE MODEL OF STRUCTURED CELL POPULATIONS IN OVARIAN FOLLICLES

In this paper, we present a strategy for tuning the parameters of a multiscale model of structured cell populations in which physiological mechanisms are embedded into the cell scale. This strategy allows one to cope with the technical difficulties raised by such models that arise from their anchorage in cell biology concepts: localized mitosis, progression within and out of the cell cycle driven by time-and possibly unknown-dependent and nonsmooth velocity coefficients. We compute different mesoscopic and macroscopic quantities from the microscopic unknowns (cell densities) and relate them to experimental cell kinetic indexes. We study the expression of reaching times corresponding to characteristic cellular transitions in a particle-like reduction of the original model. We make use of this framework to obtain an appropriate initial guess for the parameters and then perform a sequence of optimization steps subject to quantitative specifications. We finally illustrate realistic simulations of the cell populations in cohorts of interacting ovarian follicles.