title: On the reducibility of compartmental matrices.
abstract: Compartmental analysis is the most important modeling tool in biology and medicine. The perturbation due to a tracer in a biomedical system usually leads to a linear system that can be described by a compartmental matrix. The reducibility of the compartmental matrix has important implications on the system, both analytically and computationally. This note provides an efficient algorithm to determine the reducibility of a compartmental system. Furthermore, if reducible, the algorithm provides a means to delineate the sub-systems to be successively solved.
authors.affiliation: Zhou Pei-Yuan Center for Applied Mathematics, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China. jzlei@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn
authors.forename: Jin-Zhi
authors.initials: JZ
authors.lastname: Lei
authors.forename: Chang-Yi
authors.initials: CY
authors.lastname: Wang
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D019295:Computational Biology; D010084:Oxidation-Reduction