The Virtual Physiological Human/Physiome Project

Presenter: 
Professor Peter Hunter, Director, Auckland Bioengineering Institute, University of Auckland
Location: 
Monash University
Event Date and Time: 
Fri, 02/10/2009 - 12:00pm - 1:00pm

Peter's talk is part of a half-day workshop on cardiac modelling organised by the Monash e-Research Centre.

Peter's presentation (pptx) 17.3MB

The Physiome Project[1][2][3] an internationally collaborative effort to provide an integrative multi-scale modeling framework for computational physiology, has recently been boosted by a European initiative called the 'Virtual Physiological Human' (VPH)[4]. The combined VPH/Physiome Project aims to link biochemical network systems biology models and biophysically and anatomically based bioengineering models to medical imaging and biomedical signal analysis. The primary achievements so far are the development of markup languages (CellML, FieldML), freely accessible model repositories based on the markup languages, and open source computational tools for authoring, visualizing, executing and analyzing these models[5].
In addition to describing these standards and illustrating their applications, particularly for cardiac modelling, the talk will discuss current efforts to develop metadata standards for annotating model components (parameters and variables) with terms from existing ontologies such as GO[6], FMA[7] and OPB[8] that describe the biological, anatomical and biophysical meaning of these components. This development is benefitting from a collaboration with the systems biology SBML community[9]. A new standard for encoding time-varying biomedical signals and associated metadata, called BiosignalML and being developed by the EMBS Technical Committee on 'Computational Biology and the Physiome', will also be described.

 

  1. Hunter, P.J. and Borg, T.K. Integration from proteins to organs: The Physiome Project. Nature Reviews Molecular and Cell Biology. Vol 4, pp 237-243, 2003.
  2. Hunter, P.J. and Nielsen, P.M.F. A strategy for integrative computational physiology. Physiology. 20,316-325, 2005.
  3. Hunter, P.J., Crampin, E.J. and Nielsen, P.M.F. Bioinformatics, multiscale modelling and the IUPS Physiome Project. Briefings in Bioinformatics. 9 (4), 333-343, 2008.
  4. http://www.vph-noe.eu
  5. http://www.cellml.org; http://www.fieldml.org
  6. http://www.geneontology.org
  7. http://sig.biostr.washington.edu/projects/fm/AboutFM.html
  8. http://bioportal.bioontology.org/ontologies/38990
  9. http://www.sbml.org