MSV

In recent years, various terms the Virtual Physiological Human (VPH), Integrative Biology, Physiome Research have been used to describe the trend in biomedical research towards the consideration of systemic processes. These phenomena are commonly observed in living organisms but cannot be explained within a single sub-system but reflect, rather, systemic outcomes that result from the interaction of multiple sub-systems. Traditionally, when confronted by the complexity exhibited in biomedical problems, researchers have been forced to focus purely on individual sub-systems; the most common boundary separating these has been spatiotemporal scale.

The current interest in VPH is demanding greater concentration on the study and simulation of biological systems at multiple scales, and multiscale data collection and multiscale modelling have recently become synonymous with integrative research. The many VPH projects that will start to demand multiscale visualisation in the coming years suggests that this area should receive urgent attention. The Multiscale Spatiotemporal Visualisation (MSV) project aims, by international cooperation between the European @neurIST and VPHOP integrated projects, the US National Alliance for Medical Imaging Computing (NA-MIC), and the New Zealand-based IUPS Physiome initiative:
- to define an interactive visualisation paradigm for biomedical multiscale data
- to validate it on the large collections produced by the VPH projects
- to develop a concrete implementation as an open-source extension to the Visualisation Took Kit (VTK), ready to be incorporated by virtually any biomedical modelling software project.