The emergence of the deterministic Hodgkin-Huxley equations as a limit from the underlying stochastic ion-channel mechanism (Q939070)

The author treats a probabilistic approximation result for the deterministic Huxley-Hodgkin equations by a stochastic model including a large number of finite-state Markov processes coupled to a slight modification of the previous ones. More precisely for a given time horizon and up to a given probability \(\epsilon\) the stochastic process converges uniformly in the respective spaces towards the deterministic model as the number of these Markov processes increases. A natural interpretation of this result is that a model taking into account individual ion channels with a random opening mechanism is asymptotically consistent with the deterministic equation. The work is divided in five parts. After a short historic discussion and interesting introduction of the subject he presents the models and the main convergence result. The third part is dedicated to the proof of existence, uniqueness and regularity results of the stochastic solutions, at some point strongly relying on some fixed point argument. The proof of convergence result is the main part. The authors uses several nontrivial decompositions and weak approximation results in certain function spaces, where he finally can apply a Gronwall-like argument in order to conclude. In his closing remarks he sketches several extensions not covered so far.