The Role of Population Size in Computational Assessment of Pharmacological Cardiotoxicity
Matteo costi, José María Ferrero, José Félix Rodríguez Matas · Computing in cardiology · 2024
In the context of computational electrophysiological simulations aimed at assessing pharmacological cardiotoxicity, several parameters play crucial roles.Among theme, the size of the population under scrutiny emerges as potentially critical, negatively impacting on the expected final outcomes.Particularly noteworthy is the lack of a definitive standards specifying the optimal sample size to be employed.This study attempts to shed light on the influence exerted by population size on the arrhythmic risk classification of drugs.Initially, a population of 100,000 stable virtual cardiomyocytes was generated.From this initial population, ten different sets of 2989 stable models were extracted, which were subjected to cardiotoxicity analysis.Subsequently, a bootstrapping process was performed, involving the random extraction of 107 cells from a one of the sets of 2989 models.The operation was repeated 100 times for statistical significance.The study reveals a greater variability within the population of 107 cells as opposed to the larger cohort of 2989 cells.This discrepancy is to highlight the potential for considerable errors in pharmacological cardiotoxicity classification deriving from the utilization of inadequate sample sizes.