Chaste
Chaste (Cancer, Heart and Soft Tissue Environment) is a general purpose simulation package aimed at multi-scale, computationally demanding problems arising in biology and physiology. Current functionality includes tissue and cell level electrophysiology, discrete tissue modelling, and soft tissue modelling. The package is being developed by a team mainly based in the Computational Biology Group at the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, and development draws on expertise from software engineering, high performance computing, mathematical modelling and scientific computing.
Chaste is open source software and available for free download. Versions 3.0 and earlier used the GNU LGPL 2.1 licence; future versions will be available under the 3-clause BSD licence.
While Chaste is a generic extensible library, software development to date has focused primarily on two distinct application areas: continuum modelling of cardiac electrophysiology (Cardiac Chaste); and discrete modelling of cell populations (Systems Biology Chaste), with specific application to tissue homeostasis and carcinogenesis (Cancer Chaste). This website contains information on all aspects of Chaste, with details of the applications given on their own pages, accessible via the links above or on the right.
In addition to these webpages, sections of the Chaste developers' wiki are available for public browsing. The latest development version of the source code may also be obtained via that site.
For general discussion about Chaste, and questions regarding usage, we provide the Chaste users' mailing list. You can subscribe to the list by sending an email to chaste-users-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk. The mailing list will send you a confirmation request, and once you reply to it, a message confirming that you are a subscriber. List archives are available.
Survey: We have created a short survey in order to receive some feedback from users, please see here.
Latest news:
- January 2012: Chaste release 3.0 is available and is used at the cell-based Chaste Workshop.
- July 2011: We announce a Cell-based Chaste Workshop to happen at the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, 4-6 January 2012.
- July 2011: Data sets associated with Bordas et al. "Rabbit-Specific Ventricular Model of Cardiac Electrophysiological Function including Specialized Conduction System." Prog Biophys Mol Bio. (In Press, 2011) are available to download.
- May 2011: Chaste release 2.3 is available. This is a smaller release to coincide with the end of the preDiCT project. Users of release 2.2 will not see much difference; see the release notes for details.
- April 2011: Chaste release 2.2 is available.
- February 2011: A project associated with Mirams et al. "Simulation of multiple ion channel block... (Cardiovascular Research, 2011)" is available to download.
