The Virtual Human: A diagnostic tool for human studies and health effects in the 21st century

The Virtual Human will be a research/simulation environment having an integrated system of biophysical models, data, and advanced computational algorithms. It will have a Web-based interface for easy, rapid access from several points of entry. The Virtual Human will serve as a platform for national and international users from governments, academia and industry to investigate the widest range of human biological and physical responses to stimuli, be they biological, chemical, or physical. This effort will go far beyond the modeling of anatomy to incorporate refined computational models of whole-body processes, using mechanical and electrical tissue properties, and biology from physiology to biochemical information. The platform will respond mechanistically to varied and potentially iterative stimuli that can be visualized multi-dimensionally. This effort is in the formative stage of a several-year process that will lead to a program that is of similar proportion to the Human Genome, but will be much more computationally intensive. The main purpose of this paper is to communicate our early ideas about the philosophic basis of the program, to identify some of the applications for which the Virtual Human would be used, to elicit comments, and to provide a basis to identify prospective collaborators.