Effects of initial concentration and severity of infected cells on stochastic cellular automaton model dynamics for HIV infection

Abstract

This work is conducted to investigate how the initial concentration and the severity of HIV which spreads over the lymphoid tissues affect the dynamics of infection, and to what extent?. Therefore, we vary the initial concentration of HIV infected cells, P M-DC , and the severity of HIV infected cells, P I-T4 , of a stochastic cellular automaton for HIV infection which describes the dynamics of HIV infected cells spreading over a patch of lymphoid tissues. Our results reveal that the variations of P M-DC and P I-T4 do not change the feature of the dynamics of the model. They affect the dynamics of the model in the following ways: the greater the magnitude of P M-DC and P I-T4 , the faster the dynamics during the primary phase, and the severity parameter has greater effect on the model than does the HIV's initial concentration. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.