Insights to the minimal model of insulin secretion through a mean-field beta cell model.

The present work introduces an extension of the original minimal model of second phase insulin secretion during the intravenous glucose tolerance test (IVGTT), which can provide both physiological and mathematical insights to the minimal model. The extension is named the mean-field beta cell model since it returns the average response of a large number of nonlinear secretory entities. Several secretion models have been proposed for the IVGTT, and we shall identify two fundamentally different theoretical features of these models. Both features can play a central role during the IVGTT, including the one presented in the mean-field beta cell model.