Visual programming in a visual environment for liver simulation studies

The interactive system for hepatologist experimentation (ISHeE) is a visual explorative environment designed to allow a community of hepatologists to formalize, check, validate, and discuss their pathology and physiology liver models. In this environment the programming of simulation experiments is achieved by the use of visual languages. The use of conditional attributed rewriting systems is extended to the visual language definition, and the case of a visual language for programming the simulation of a population of hepatic cells is studied. How such a visual language allows the construction of programs which are expressed by the combination of graphical symbols which are familiar to the physician or which schematize shapes familiar to the physician and resemble the simulated system observed in the experiments is discussed. It is shown how a visual approach avoids the request of unnecessary precision during the interaction, leaving the user to focus on the solution of the problem