Cell viability models for tissue exposed to ablative temperatures can be broadly split into two classes: mechanistic lumped parameters models based on observations of the response of individual cells; and statistical models. Several of the mechanistic models are presented here as they can be captured by CellML.

The lumped parameter models of cell viability are based on observations that cells exposed to thermal insult can either recover or die. For this reason the models have a minimum of two compartments representing dead or alive cells, and a potentially infinite number of compartments representing the states between alive and dead. This can be represented schematically, as in Figure 1.

The four models presented here are:

• Arrhenius - 2 x compartments,
• Moussa1979 - 3 x compartments,
• Jung1986 - ∞ x compartments,
• O'Neill2011 - 3 x compartments, nonlinear.