GENERALIZED CELLULAR AUTOMATA FOR STUDYING THE BEHAVIOR OF CELL POPULATIONS

Cellular automata are generalized to handle non-local rules, i.e. rules taking into account the states of the whole set of objects present in the array. Considering a binary state (presence/absence of objects), evolution rules are defined as a function of the local density of objects, estimated according to the Parzen method. This allows tackling problems found in the field of cellular sociology, such as cell clustering or cell sorting.