Table 1.

Advantages and disadvantages of selected cancer stem cell in silico modeling techniques

Modeling technique	Advantages	Disadvantages
Markov	Establishes the steady-state proportion of the given cell types	Requires cell types to grow at equal rates
Stochastic processes (birth/death and branching)	Estimates both cell number and proportions	Requires feedback between states to reach a stable steady state
Differential equation based (partial and ordinary)	Flexible, deployable to address a large number of questions	Requires numerous parameters, some of which might not be measurable
Agent-based models and cellular automaton	Details of three-dimensional growth of tumors composed of individual cells	Computationally expensive, complex to construct, assumption dependent