A novel piece-wise constant pancreatic β-cell cluster model: reproductions of various spiking phenomena of pancreatic β-cell cluster and efficient FPGA implementation.

A novel pancreas β-cell cluster model is presented based on the concept of piece-wise constant (PWC) spiking vector field. It is shown that the presented model can qualitatively reproduce various spiking phenomena and related bifurcation phenomena of a biologically plausible Hodgkin-Huxley-type ordinary differential equation (ODE) β-cell cluster model. In addition, the presented model is implemented by a field programmable gate array and it is demonstrated that the presented model is much more hardware-efficient (i.e., consumes much less circuit elements and much lower power) than the ODE β-cell cluster model. The potential applications of the presented model are also discussed, including its use in pancreas prosthetic devices and large-scale metabolism simulators.Clinical relevance-The presented model would be useful to develop a pancreas prosthetic device and a large-scale metabolism simulator.