Multi-scale models of organs and organ systems are being developed under the umbrella of the Physiome Project of the International Union of Physiological Sciences (IUPS) and the Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) project funded by the European Commission. These computational physiology models deal with multiple physical processes (coupled tissue mechanics, electrical activity, fluid flow, etc) and multiple spatial and temporal scales. They are intended both to help understand physiological function and to provide a basis for diagnosing and treating pathologies in a clinical setting. A long term goal of the project is to use computational modeling to analyze integrative biological function in terms of underlying structure and molecular mechanisms. It is also establishing web-accessible physiological databases dealing with model-related data at the cell, tissue, organ and organ system levels [1-3].
This talk will provide an update on the current state of the standards, databases and software being developed to support robust and reproducible multi-scale models for the VPH/Physiome project. These standards include CellML [4] and FieldML [5] for encoding models and BioSignalML for encoding time-varying signal data, together with model repositories and software tools [6] for creating, visualizing and executing the models based on these standards. Recent work has focussed on the semantic annotation of physiological models in order to link parameters and variables in the models with bioinformatic databases [7].
