Cell Neighbor Determination in the Metazoan Embryo System

Abstract

Cell neighbor determination is a significant component in the simulation of a metazoan embryo system since it influences a number of fundamental biological processes, such as cell signaling, migration, and proliferation. Traditional approaches to find the neighbors of a cell such as Voronoi diagram successfully accomplish this goal, but are too time-consuming as the number of cells grows exponentially. In this paper, we propose a learning-based algorithm that determines the neighbors of specific cells in the metazoan embryo in real-time. We decrease the computational time by four orders of magnitude, and achieve an accuracy of 99.66%. For the verification purpose, the simulation results indicate that our model successfully reproduces the neighbor relationship in C. elegans Notch signaling pathways and cell-cell squeeze force modeling of the cell division process.