Creating a Digital Human: A Guide
Building a Virtual Human: A Journey into the Future of Medicine
The CompBioMed consortium, led by University College London, is at the forefront of global efforts to create the virtual human. On 27 September, this vision takes a step closer with the 'How to build a virtual human' event at the Science Museum's IMAX Theatre.
This special Lates event will explore the creation of a virtual human, featuring discussions from renowned scientists including Prof Peter Coveney (UCL), Prof Alfons Hoekstra (University of Amsterdam), Prof Blanca Rodriguez (Oxford University), and Prof Marco Viceconti (Sheffield University).
Prof Coveney will delve into simulating how drugs work in the body, including for cancer and AIDS, while Prof Rodriguez will focus on virtual hearts. Prof Hoekstra will discuss virtual blood vessels, and Prof Viceconti, a key player in the Virtual Physiological Human initiative, will provide insights into the broader context of digital twins and healthcare.
The virtual version of a patient could breathe, blister, and bleed, allowing for detailed exploration and testing. This could revolutionize medicine, enabling doctors to recreate patients in a computer for testing treatments, planning surgeries, selecting treatments, and studying organ functions—all without risk to patients.
Medical simulations are carried out using supercomputers like ARCHER (UK national supercomputer) and SuperMUC (Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Germany). Initiatives like CompBioMed aim to enable doctors to create customized virtual models of patients for better diagnosis and treatment.
The Medicine Galleries at the Science Museum are set to open in 2019, and a 3D printed kidney has already been acquired for these galleries for organ transplant planning. These virtual hearts can be used to study electrical signals and look for arrhythmias.
The CompBioMed initiative contributes to building a virtual human by developing advanced computational techniques and research software applications in computational biomedicine. This includes creating sophisticated simulations and models of human physiology that integrate multiple biomedical data types to better understand and predict human biological behavior in health and disease.
CompBioMed focuses on developing computational methods that capture the complexity of biological systems at various scales relevant to the human body, producing software tools that enable high-performance simulations for personalized medicine and biomedical research, and facilitating the integration of multi-scale data to construct realistic virtual human models usable for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes.
The event, in partnership with the €5 million CompBioMed initiative, is free and tickets are available online. The 'How to build a virtual human' event runs from 19.30-20.30 in the IMAX Theatre on 27 September. The Science Museum Lates is an event over 18s, running from 18.45-22.00, with free admission but some events requiring tickets. The IMAX audience can interact with scientists from the CompBioMed consortium, who are working on recreating a human being in silico.
In the future, the virtual human could be a reality, transforming the way we approach healthcare and medicine. Join us on this exciting journey and witness the future of medicine unfold.
- The CompBioMed initiative, working on recreating a human being in silico, utilizes data-and-cloud-computing to advance science in medical-conditions, particularly in simulations of human physiology, such as virtual hearts, blood vessels, and studying organ functions.
- With technology enabling the creation of a virtual human, this innovation could revolutionize medicine, providing doctors with the tools to test treatments, plan surgeries, and study medical-conditions, all while reducing risk for patients.
