A note on the use of a stochastic mammillary compartmental model as an environmental safety model

Abstract

Environmental safety testing typically requires procedures for extrapolating from the relatively high experimental to the very low use doses of potentially harmful substances. In the present paper, a stochastic mammillary compartmental model for environmental safety testing is proposed and extrapolation procedures based on its dose-response relationship are developed. The proposed model is a direct generalization of one of the basic safety models, the one-hit model, in that a harmful reaction is assumed to occur if at any time any of the peripheral compartments attains a specified threshold of particles. Consideration of a closed model yields an upper bound on the probability of attaining a certain threshold level, thus providing a conservative procedure for extrapolating to a low dose, while a lower bound obtained from a related open model provides a useful monitoring device as to the sharpness of the upper bound. The extrapolation procedure is illustrated with simulated data and approximations for initial values are developed.