© 2006 STEP Consortium

Towards the Towards the EuroPhysiome roadmapEuroPhysiome roadmap

STEP CONFERENCE#1

Hard Tissue Strand discussionMonday, May 15th

Fulvia Taddei

© 2006 STEP Consortium

HT StrandWhole body:

– Skeleton kinematics

– Musculoskeletal modelling

Organ level:– Bone biomechanics

– Dental biomechanics

Tissue/cell level:– Bone modelling and remodelling

– Fracture healing

– Bone/implant integration

© 2006 STEP Consortium

HT ModellingThe mathematical modelling of the skeleton behaviour to predict its function and its adaptive response to altered conditions

– PHYSIOLOGICAL AND PATHOLOGICAL CONDITIONS

– MULTISCALE APPROACH

– COUPLED WITH SOFT-TISSUE MODELLING

© 2006 STEP Consortium

Spatial/time scales

• Spatial scale from 10^-3mm to 10^3mm

• Time scale from 10^-3s to 10^6s

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Computational effort

• From standard PC to HPC facilities• From few mins to 5000 hours of

CPU time• From few Mb to several Gb

© 2006 STEP Consortium

Activities that need innovation

• Automatic mesh generation• Validation• Reliable anthropometrical data

from wide populations• Image processing and data fusion• Quantitative experimental data for

parameters setting• Protocols standardisation

© 2006 STEP Consortium

Major research challenges

• Subject-specific FEM generation• Verification/validation• Accurate in-vivo skeletal motion

© 2006 STEP Consortium

Methods to be improved

• Multiscale data fusion• Protocols for movement analysis

© 2006 STEP Consortium

Lacking resources

• Infrastructures to store and exchange data

• Shared exp/clinical/imaging/modelling data libraries

• People recruiting• Fundings

© 2006 STEP Consortium

Ethical issues

• Difficulties in accessing body donation programs

• In-vivo clinical data acquisition

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Other barriers?

• Communication between research groups

• Communication between different backgrounds (e.g. clinicians/engineers)

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Can collaboration help?

YES

Data/models/algorithms/competencesharing

© 2006 STEP Consortium

How to improve collaboration

• Identify a clear and shared goal• Develop standards• Create mechanism to improve

contacts and collaboration like international networks

• Exchange of personnel

© 2006 STEP Consortium

Foreseen VHP impact

• Orthopaedic and pharmaceutical manufacturers

• Personalised treatment for rare pathologies

• Improve diagnosis and rehabilitative plans

© 2006 STEP Consortium

The Roadmap

• Common Objectives• Research Challenges• Resources Required• Ethical, Legal and Gender Issues• Organisation Model• Community Building Initiatives

© 2006 STEP Consortium

Common Objectives• Create a self-governing community to:

– Set the rules for the collaborations– Set the technological standards– Maintain a semantic representation of the

VPH– Coordinate dissemination efforts– Protect the logos, the names, etc.– Steer VPH development by providing grants,

prices, etc.

© 2006 STEP Consortium

Common Objectives (cont’d)

• Establish some pilot repositories– LHDL– AneurIST– ???

• Develop common tools:– Middleware for the creation of federated

VPH repositories– Extensible software framework for the

creation of VPH resources– Application software for the provision of

solutions to final users

© 2006 STEP Consortium

Common Objectives (cont’d)

• Management– Develop and operate the VPH portal– Establish pilot exploitation initiatives– Develop business models for long-

term sustainability

© 2006 STEP Consortium

Research challenges - HT

CONSENSUS NOT REACHED ON SINGLE CHALLENGES BUT ON STRUCTURE

•Whole body level•Organ level•Tissue level

•Cell level•Sub-cell level

…WORK IN PROGRESS..

© 2006 STEP Consortium

Whole body level

• Accuracy of motion data• Anthropometrical reliable data• Validation• Movement control

© 2006 STEP Consortium

Research challengestranslational

• Anatomy & Physiology– General scaling rules for anatomy– How to merge subject-specific and population

based anatomical models– Experimental data to validate models to predict

pathological and physiological changes– Quantitative/absolute information of cellular and

molecular biology– Quantitative/absolute information of tissues

histomorphology– Quantitative/absolute information on

Cellular/extracellular components

© 2006 STEP Consortium

Research challengestranslational

• Multiscale modelling– How to include mesoscale morphology in

the continuum formulation on each level?– How to characterise and model effectively

and accurately non-homogeneity and anisotropy of tissues?

– How to discretise a spatial domain defined by sampling and not by boundary?

– How to concatenate or couple different simulations in a generic way?

© 2006 STEP Consortium

Research challengestranslational

• ICT Infrastructure– How to provide transparent access to the

(federate) GRID resources (data repository and computational facilities)?

– Support for optimisation and parallelisation– How to deal with the proliferation of formats

in digital biomedical data?– How to create repositories of simulations?– How to include models targeting

commercial solvers?

© 2006 STEP Consortium

Resources Required• Direct EC funding for continuous operation of

the common infrastructure• Funding for developing European networks

– between Domain Experts and Users– between Technologists and Domains experts

• Funding for large VPH sub-systems:– …– Musculoskeletal– …

• Several smaller grants for specific topics (e.g. biology, bioengineering, ICT, early clinical demonstrators)

© 2006 STEP Consortium

Resources Required (cont’d)

• Programs to coordinate VPH national efforts

• Programs to encourage cross-disciplinary training and educational programs and researchers mobility

© 2006 STEP Consortium

Ethical, Legal and Gender Issues

• Clinical data ownership• Limits of clinical data sharing• EC data sharing policy (NIH

model?)• IPR models • Affirmative policies for gender

equality in all VPH initiatives

© 2006 STEP Consortium

The Organisational Model

• A no-profit organisation that owns the assets and moderate the community

• An independent organisation (public or private) directly supported by the EC that operates the common infrastructure (portal, software suite distribution, etc.)

© 2006 STEP Consortium

The Organisational Model

• An array of VPH hosting nodes located at public supercomputing centres sustained at the national level as services to the research community, but open for hosting of data from any member state (final users access might be limited to nationals)

• A federation of Europhysiome projects that access the common infrastructure in exchange of adhesion to the rules of the VPH

© 2006 STEP Consortium

Community Building Initiatives

• Create a data sharing policy based on barter or on the collection of access fees that the resource owner can modulate on the type of user (profit, no-profit, clinical, etc.)

• Promote all-inclusiveness in the management of the initiative

• Promote a distribution of resources based on goal orientation