Researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine recently joined a nationwide, NIH-funded initiative to develop the first comprehensive digital map of the healthy human body.
The Whole Person Physiome Research and Coordination Center will unite experts in physiology, precision medicine, and computational biology in a coordinated effort to digitize human physiological function. The result will be an information and networking hub that is readily accessible for use by both researchers and artificial intelligence tools.
This five-year research initiative emphasizes “whole person health.” Rather than focusing on separate organs or body systems, like most biomedical research does, this approach considers multiple interconnected factors in a comprehensive view of the whole human body.
“This initiative represents a bold step forward in how we study and model human physiology,” director of the Penn/CHOP Kidney Innovation Center Katalin Susztak said.
The map will integrate medical data such as test results and vital signs that can be manipulated by medical experts to see how different diseases or treatments might affect the body. Future stages of the project aim to include measures such as blood pressure, blood glucose, and cholesterol, according to the NIH website.
A key component of the Whole Person Physiome Map is easy access by computers and artificial intelligence.
“By integrating clinical data, computational modeling, and physiological processes, we aim to build a dynamic, AI-ready resource that will empower researchers and clinicians to better understand health and disease,” associate Penn professor and investor in the CHOP Research Institute Liming Pei said.
This effort is part of a broader shift by Penn Medicine to incorporate technology and AI into medical research, such as recent tools to personalize kidney disease treatment, and clinical operations, including an AI-guided imaging system, to help physicians identify internal organ abnormalities.
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The project will be open to researchers across the country who can both contribute directly and utilize the resources for their own studies.
