Antonio LaTorre

Antonio LaTorre, Man Ting Kwong, Julián A. García-Grajales et al.

Neuronal damage, in the form of both brain and spinal cord injuries, is one of the major causes of disability and death in young adults worldwide. One way to assess the direct damage occurring after a mechanical insult is the simulation of the neuronal cells functional deficits following the mechanical event. In this study, we use a coupled mechanical electrophysiological model with several free parameters that are required to be calibrated against experimental results. The calibration is carried out by means of an evolutionary algorithm (differential evolution, DE) that needs to evaluate each configuration of parameters on six different damage cases, each of them taking several minutes to compute. To minimise the simulation time of the parameter tuning for the DE, the stretch of one unique fixed-diameter axon with a simplified triggering process is used to speed up the calculations. The model is then leveraged for the parameter optimization of the more realistic bundle of independent axons, an impractical configuration to run on a single processor computer. To this end, we have developed a parallel implementation based on OpenMP that runs on a multi-processor taking advantage of all the available computational power. The parallel DE algorithm obtains good results, outperforming the best effort achieved by published manual calibration, in a fraction of the time. While not being able to fully capture the experimental results, the resulting nerve model provides a complex averaging framework for nerve damage simulation able to simulate gradual axonal functional alteration in a bundle.

Antonio LaTorre, Daniel Molina, Eneko Osaba et al.

Bio-inspired optimization (including Evolutionary Computation and Swarm Intelligence) is a growing research topic with many competitive bio-inspired algorithms being proposed every year. In such an active area, preparing a successful proposal of a new bio-inspired algorithm is not an easy task. Given the maturity of this research field, proposing a new optimization technique with innovative elements is no longer enough. Apart from the novelty, results reported by the authors should be proven to achieve a significant advance over previous outcomes from the state of the art. Unfortunately, not all new proposals deal with this requirement properly. Some of them fail to select appropriate benchmarks or reference algorithms to compare with. In other cases, the validation process carried out is not defined in a principled way (or is even not done at all). Consequently, the significance of the results presented in such studies cannot be guaranteed. In this work we review several recommendations in the literature and propose methodological guidelines to prepare a successful proposal, taking all these issues into account. We expect these guidelines to be useful not only for authors, but also for reviewers and editors along their assessment of new contributions to the field.