Creating a graphical user interface to define model parameters for PhysiCell

Randy Heiland, Adam Morrow, Grant Waldrow, Drew Willis, Kim Crevecoeur, Paul MacklinPhysiCell is an open source, hybrid continuum-discrete mathematical modeling system that combines off-lattice discrete agents with a reaction-diffusion framework and has been applied to a broad variety of problems in mathematical biology. Early versions of PhysiCell generally required both writing C++ code and hand-editing XML configuration files to define a model. As the framework has evolved, most of the C++ model definition code has moved into the XML, making it easier to create, run, and share models. Our poster describes the design and development of a graphical user interface to generate the entire XML model. Our goal is to help create a future where powerful agent based models can be defined and simulated with relative ease. This project, which involves several undergraduate (REU) students, provides a nice complement to a previously published undergraduate-related project: xml2jupyter.