Contents I. Introduction
The membrane of a biological cell can become permeable when the cell is exposed to intense electric field pulses. This phenomenon discovered during the 1960s begins nowadays to be exploited in clinical applications, such as electrochemotherapy [1] and electrogenetherapy. The modeling of electropermeabilization (EP) is particulary complex because the changes in the membrane physiology induce at the cell scale (and therefore at the tissue scale) modifications of the conductivity that depend on the applied field. In [2], a first modeling of EP at the tissue scale is proposed, based on a phenomenological non-linear Ohm’s law. This approach makes it possible to explain some quantitative experimental results. But, in this paper, we introduce a static sequential EP modeling in which the non-linear Ohm’s law would explain the evolution of the EP. However, since there is no dynamic equation, the comparison between the numerical and experimental chronogramms of current is not convincing. In addition, the parameters of the model are estimated based on the current measured at the electrodes, which cannot provide any spatial information on the electropermeabilized region. In this paper, we propose to model the irreversible EP from the observation of the necrosis that appears when the EP reaches the irreversible threshold; the surface of the potato becomes darker and these experiments can be used to fit the parameters of the non-linear Ohm’s law. Some uncertainties are introduced in our model (parameters in Ohm’s law, position of the electrodes, and threshold defined to delimit the necrosis area) in order to identify the critical parameter(s) and quantify the uncertainty of the calculated necrosis surface [6].
