Computational Electrophysiology (A First Course in "In Silico Medicine")

Biological systems inherently possess much ambiguity or uncertainty. Computational electrophysiology is the one area, from among the vast and rapidly growing discipline of computational and systems biology, in which computational or mathematical models have succeeded. This textbook provides a practical and quick guide to both computational electrophysiology and numerical bifurcation analysis. Bifurcation analysis is a very powerful tool for the analysis of such highly nonlinear biological systems. Bifurcation theory provides a way to analyze the effect of a parameter change on a system and to detect a critical parameter value when the qualitative nature of the system changes. Included in this work are many examples of numerical computations of bifurcation analysis of various models as well as mathematical models with different abstraction levels from neuroscience and electrophysiology. This volume will benefit graduate and undergraduate students as well as researchers in diverse fields of science.