ACTIVITIES :: ICT for Health :: Research :: Projects :: Virtual physiological human

Virtual physiological human

eHealth

Deciding what treatment to give patients with serious illnesses, organ failure or even genetic disorders can present doctors with great difficulties. Whilst their potential benefits are clear, complex treatments often have both predictable and unpredictable side effects, and so there are always risks attached to any given choice. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can provide medical professionals with tools to model and predict the effects of different treatment options in individual patients. EU funding, through the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), is helping to develop such new systems.

Huge amounts of data are generated by the pharmaceutical and medical devices industries in development and trials of their products, and by medical professionals recording their treatments of individual patients and their outcomes. Only a small fraction of this wealth of data is used to contribute to the development of safer treatment options applicable to individual patients. That is because potential users only have access to a small proportion of the data available and because they do not have appropriate tools to process it.

The problem for medical professionals is that the results of a given treatment in a particular patient are dependent on a wide range of factors, which could include age, physical condition, gender, fitness, previous exposure to illness, for example. Factors of this sort are already considered by doctors and surgeons when treating patients with serious conditions. Today, however, biomedical techniques offer additional possibilities, to add factors such as genetic make-up, cell structures and neurological patterns. Although medical professionals can now be much better informed on their patients’ conditions, such data also complicate their work.

ICT tools are essential, both to gather such data and to analyse it. The concept of a virtual physical human is a sophisticated computer modelling tool, which compares observations of an individual patient and relates them to a vast dataset of observations of others with similar symptoms and known conditions. By processing all this information, the model can simulate the likely reaction of the individual patient to possible treatments or interventions. Such tools will not only improve the quality of treatment offered to patients who are already ill or injured, but could also be used in preventive medicine, to predict occurrence or worsening of specific diseases in people at risk, for example through family history.

A new call for proposal will open in January 2012. The work-programme and the related documents (information package, guide for applicants, etc...) will be available on the Cordis Calls page and direct references will be available on this page under the Highlights section.

Computer models
Projects

Computer models

A total of €72 million has been allocated to this field in the first year of FP7 (2007), with a suite of projects planned to get under way in 2008. The bulk of this funding will go to projects that develop new computational models and/or data processing techniques appropriate for clinical applications in three areas:

simulation for surgical training, planning and intervention;
prediction or early diagnosis of disease by integrating patient history with biomedical imaging (from X-rays, scans and internal camera examination of the patient as well as microscopic examination of cells removed from the body); and
simulation environments for assessing the efficacy and safety of specific drugs.

In addition, FP7 funds will be used to support a network of researchers in the field of modelling and simulation of human anatomy and physiology.

The Commission intends also to support the use of Grid capabilities (i.e. harnessing many computers across different sites in a network to increase computing power) to process the huge quantities of data involved. It will also seek to boost international co-operation with research partners in Latin America, around the Mediterranean and in the western Balkans, to strengthen European industry’s leadership in the field of medical imaging. Of particular importance for research work in this area is the security and privacy of patient-specific data, given that many partners in different institutions and countries may be involved in processing such data.

The development of modelling tools in this field will be based on highly inter-disciplinary work, and the Commission wishes to see partnerships formed between researchers in fast developing fields such as medical informatics, molecular medicine and biotechnology, as well as those of medical imaging and pharmaceuticals. The key to success will be the research teams’ ability to make efficient use of the wealth of data inputs available to them.

Projects

ICT-based tools have massive potential to improve risk assessment, gathering and processing data to ensure policy-makers have the best possible basis to target resources on healthcare needs.

In FP7, the Commission gives financial support for projects which seek to develop advanced ICT applications to improve risk assessment and patient safety.

All VPH projects in one book (draft layout)

Action-Grid - International cooperative action on grid computing and biomedical informatics between the European Union, Latin America, the Western Balkans and North Africa (factsheet)
AirPROM Airway Disease PRedicting Outcomes through Patient Specific Computational Modelling
ARCH - Patient specific image-based computational modelling for improvement of short- and long-term outcome of vascular access in patient on hemodialysis therapy (factsheet)
ARTreat - Multi-level patient-specific artery and atherogenesis model for outcome prediction, decision support treatment, and virtual hand-on training (factsheet)
ContraCancrum - Clinically Oriented Translational Cancer Multilevel Modelling (factsheet)
DISCIPULUS - "Digitally Integrated Scientific Data for Patients and Populations in User-Specific Simulations"
euHeart - Personalised and intergrated cardiac care: Patient-specific Cardiovascular Modelling and Simulation for In Silico Disease Understanding and Management and for Medical Device Evaluation and Optimization (factsheet)
FUSIMO - Patient specific modelling and simulation of focused ultrasound in moving organs
GRANATUM - A social collaborative working space semantically interlinking biomedical researchers, knowledge and data for the design and execution of in-silico models and experiments in cancer chemoprevention (factsheet)
HAMAM - Highly Accurate Breast Cancer Diagnosis through Integration of Biological Knowledge, Novel Imaging Modalities, and Modelling (factsheet)
IMPPACT - Image-based Multi-scale Physiological Planning for Ablation Cancer Treatment (factsheet)
INBIOMEDvision - Promoting and Monitoring Biomedical Informatics in Europe (factsheet)
INTEGRATE -Driving Excellence in Integrative Cancer Research through Innovative Biomedical Infrastructures (factsheet)
NeoMark - ICT Enabled Prediction of Cancer Reoccurrence (factsheet)
p-medicine - From data sharing and integration via VPH models to personalised medicine (factsheet)
PASSPORT - Patient Specific Simulation and PreOperative Realistic Training for liver surgery (factsheet)
preDICT - Computational Prediction of Drug Cardiac Toxicity (factsheet)
PredictAD - From Patient Data to Personalised Healthcare in Alzheimer's Disease (factsheet)
Radical - Road mapping technology for Enhancing Security to Protect Medical & Genetic Data (factsheet)
VPH NoE - Virtual Physiological Human Network of Excellence (factsheet)
VPH2 - Virtual Pathological Heart of the Virtual Physiological Human (factsheet)
VPHOP - Osteoporotic Virtual Physiological Human (factsheet)
MSV - Multiscale Spatiotemporal Visualisation: development of an open-source software library for the interactive visualisation of multiscale biomedical data
MySPINE Functional prognosis simulation of patient-specific spinal treatment for clinical use
NMS Physiome - VPHOP-SIMBIOS cooperation: Tools to develop the NeuroMusculoSkeletal Physiome
RICORDO - Researching Interoperability using Core Reference Datasets and Ontologies for the Virtual Physiological Human
Sim-e-Child - Grid-Enabled Platform for Simulations in Paediatric Cardiology – Toward the Personalized Virtual Child Heart (factsheet)
Synergy-COPD - Moodelling and simulation for systems medecine / Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease - COPD - as a use case (factsheet)
TBIcare - Evidence-based Diagnostic and Treatment Planning Solution for Traumatic Brain Injuries (factsheet)
THROMBUS - A quantitative model of thrombosis in intracranial aneurysms
TUMOR - Transatlantic TUmour MOdel Repositories
VIGOR++ - Virtual GastrOintestinal tRact (factsheet)
VPH-Share - Virtual Physiological Human: Sharing for Healthcare - A Research Environment (factsheet)

Last update by the Editor (ehealth(AT)cec.eu.int): 30/01/12