Concept maps and canonical models in neuropsychiatry

Most bioscientists engage in informal modelling in their research and explicitly document this activity's results in diagrams or "concept maps". While canonical modelling approaches such as Biochemical Systems Theory (BST) immediately allow the construction of a corresponding system of equations, the problem of determining appropriate parameter values remains. Goel et al. introduced Concept Map Modelling (CMM) as a framework to address this problem through an interactive dialogue between experimenters and modellers. The CMM dialogue extracts the experimenters' implicit knowledge about dynamical behaviour of the parts of the system being modelled in form of rough sketches and verbal statements, e.g. value ranges. These are then used as inputs for parameter and initial value estimates for the symbolic canonical model based on the diagram. Canonical models have the big advantage that a great variety of parameter estimation methods have been developed for them in recent years. The paper discusses the suitability of this approach for neuropsychiatry using recent work of Qi et al. on a canonical model of presynaptic dopamine metabolism. Due to the complexity of systems encountered in neuropsychiatry, hybrid models are often used to complement the canonical models discussed here.