Introduction
CancerSim is largely the result of an influential paper, "
The Hallmarks of Cancer" written by Hanahan and Weinberg. The paper identifies six cellular alterations necessary for cancerous growth. CancerSim was built to explore these hallmarks. The simulation allows the user to explore the phenomenon of cancer by simulating and visualizing cell growth and genetic mutation.
CancerSim was created by
Robert Abbott at the University of New Mexico. His
master's thesis contains more detailed information regarding the CancerSim project.
Software Description
The CancerSim allows users the simulate and visualize cell growth and genetic mutation on a three-dimensional grid or through the command-line interface. The simulation begins with a single cell. As the simulation proceeds cells may undergo mitosis, apoptosis, or signal for angiogenesis. Normal cells may undergo mitosis only within the tissue region. The simulation will terminate when cancer occupies 90% of the area, when all cells die, or after an arbitrary number of steps. [
Screenshot ]
The CancerSim Review GUI provides a graphical display of a course parameter sweep of CancerSim. The parameter sweep comprises of 4374 runs and over 1.3 trillion cell events in total.
Users' Guide
Installation
The source code has been released under GPL [
Download Source ].
Binaries: [
OS X ][
Windows ]
Requirements for Graphical Interface:
wxWidgets (formerly wxWindows) installed with OpenGL support [
Available here ].
(
wxWiki is an excellent resource for troubleshooting wxWidgets installation. )
reviewGUI requires gnuplot
Instructions :
Unpack the source code.
Run 'make install'
( On OSX use makefile 'makefile.mac' )
To run CancerSim :
run 'CLI' for command-line interface
run 'GUI' for graphical interface
( In OSX run 'CancerSim' from the Finder )
To run CancerSim Review :
download the
parameter sweep output data
untar the directory (do not unzip the files inside)
set CANCERSIM_REVIEW_DATA_DIR in your environment
run 'reviewGUI'
(for OSX run in X)
