title: Interactively illustrating polymerization using three-level model fusion.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Research in cell biology is steadily contributing new knowledge about many aspects of physiological processes, both with respect to the involved molecular structures as well as their related function. Illustrations of the spatio-temporal development of such processes are not only used in biomedical education, but also can serve scientists as an additional platform for in-silico experiments.
  
  
  RESULTS
  In this paper, we contribute a new, three-level modeling approach to illustrate physiological processes from the class of polymerization at different time scales. We integrate physical and empirical modeling, according to which approach best suits the different involved levels of detail, and we additionally enable a form of interactive steering, while the process is illustrated. We demonstrate the suitability of our approach in the context of several polymerization processes and report from a first evaluation with domain experts.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  We conclude that our approach provides a new, hybrid modeling approach for illustrating the process of emergence in physiology, embedded in a densely filled environment. Our approach of a complementary fusion of three systems combines the strong points from the different modeling approaches and is capable to bridge different spatial and temporal scales.
authors.affiliation: Department of Informatics, University of Bergen, N-5020 Bergen, Norway. Ivan.Kolesar@UiB.no.
authors.forename: Ivan
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Kolesar
authors.forename: Julius
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Parulek
authors.forename: Ivan
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Viola
authors.forename: Stefan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Bruckner
authors.forename: Anne-Kristin
authors.initials: AK
authors.lastname: Stavrum
authors.forename: Helwig
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Hauser
mesh_terms: D008954:Models, Biological; D010829:Physiological Phenomena; D058105:Polymerization