A nonlinear input-output model of intracellular thiamine kinetics

Critical to structural modelling of the intracellular thiamine kinetics in the intestine tissue is the incomplete knowledge of the intrinsic nonlinearity of the absorption process from plasma to cells as well as the paucity of the available experimental data. The latter cause may be also responsible for the failure of traditional black-box modelling approaches. This paper deals with a novel hybrid modelling framework which builds on the qualitative structural knowledge a good initialization of an approximation scheme of the nonlinear functional relationship between the input-output variables. Such an initialization allows us to efficiently cope with the poor data set and to derive an input-output model of the intracellular thiamine kinetics in the intestine tissue. Although the structural assumptions are relaxed and only a descriptive quantitative knowledge may be derived, the model obtained is robust enough to be used as a simulator. The interpretative potential of the model derived has been tested on diabetic subjects.