Continuous Branching Processes with Settlement in Cancer Metastasis: Stochastic Modelling and the Feller Property

Abstract

Motivated by models of cancer metastasis, this paper introduces a type of (multi-type) branching process that records the positions of particles, representing tumor cells or clusters. Particles may be absorbed (removed from the state space), move, or settle. The process is rigorously constructed, and the Markov property is established via embedding into a multidimensional process that tracks the labels, positions, and phases (moving or resting) of living particles. The Feller property for the associated semigroup is investigated. It is proved for a simplified model that tracks the number of particles in each class, and an explicit generator is derived, enabling Feynman-Kac-type formulas in this framework.