Draft:Virtual Population
 | Draft article not currently submitted for review.
This is a draft Articles for creation (AfC) submission. It is not currently pending review. While there are no deadlines, abandoned drafts may be deleted after six months. To edit the draft click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the window. To be accepted, a draft should:
It is strongly discouraged to write about yourself, your business or employer. If you do so, you must declare it. Where to get help
How to improve a draft
You can also browse Wikipedia:Featured articles and Wikipedia:Good articles to find examples of Wikipedia's best writing on topics similar to your proposed article. Improving your odds of a speedy review To improve your odds of a faster review, tag your draft with relevant WikiProject tags using the button below. This will let reviewers know a new draft has been submitted in their area of interest. For instance, if you wrote about a female astronomer, you would want to add the Biography, Astronomy, and Women scientists tags. Editor resources
Last edited by GoneDutch (talk | contribs) 4 days ago. (Update) |
The Virtual Population (ViP) is a set of computational human and animal models developed by the Foundation for Research on Information Technologies in Society (IT'IS) in collaboration with the US Food and Drug Administration (US FDA). The platform is managed by the IT'IS Foundation, an independent non-profit research institute based in Zurich, Switzerland dedicated to advancing computational modeling of biological tissues. The ViP models are an integral part of the Sim4Life computational simulation platform developed by ZMT Zurich MedTech AG (ZMT) in Zurich, Switzerland, in partnership with IT'IS.
Overview
[edit]The ViP is made up of computational models that can be used across various scientific and medical fields. The models facilitate the simulation of physical interactions with biological tissues, supporting applications such as medical device development, radiological safety assessments, and tissue engineering research. The models include representations of whole-body computational phantoms and specific body regions of humans as well as computational phantoms of animals and animal tissues of species typically used in medical research.
The IT’IS Foundation also maintains a database of tissue properties to provide the computational life sciences community with values for electromagnetic (EM), thermal, fluid, acoustic, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) properties of biological tissues. The database was developed from published resources and is continually updated. Users can import the material database into the Sim4Life simulation software platform and automatically assign tissue parameter values to the ViP models.
Development
[edit]The development of the ViP models began with the creation of four surface-based anatomically correct whole body human models of a 34-year-old adult male, a 26-year-old adult female, an 11-year-old girl, and a 6-year-old boy – originally referred to as the Virtual Family – for evaluation of EM exposure in different age groups and body types.[1] These models were based on high resolution MRI data of healthy volunteers were provided to the scientific community free-of-charge.
Subsequent advancements led to the development of higher-resolution, multi-organ models and an expansion of the Virtual Family to the Virtual Population with more models of both sexes ranging in age from 5 to 84 years old.[2] In addition to providing broader population coverage, the ViP enhanced models are suitable for evaluation of the safety of diagnostic and therapeutic applications, including assessments of medical implant safety.
The ViP models were upgraded with the physics-based "Poser" method implemented in Sim4Life, which allows the posture of the models to be altered via finite element method (FEM) simulations, wherein the body is treated as a deformable hyperelastic material with rigid bones.
A further upgrade to the ViP models was to make the models morphable, to simulate how an individual would gain or lose weight through changes in the distribution of subcutaneous adipose tissue (SAT). The changes in the SAT volume elastically deform the surrounding tissues but are constrained by rigid bones. The morphing capability effectively broadens the body mass index (BMI) distribution of the ViP models.
Certain applications in computational life sciences require access to high precision models of specific organs. The IT’IS Foundation in collaboration with the US FDA developed the MIDA, a detailed computational anatomical model of the head and neck,[3] and four additional head models – the IXI Head Models – segmented from the IXI dataset,[4] a public multi-modal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) collection include detailed representations of eyes, deep brain structures, scalp layers, blood vessels, and salivary glands. The ViP hand library is a set of 12 computational right hands of different sizes and ages extracted from the full-body ViP models.
In addition to the human computational models, the IT'IS Foundation also developed the Virtual Zoo (ViZoo) models – a set of detailed high-resolution anatomical animal models created from MRI or cryosection image data. Computational animal phantoms can be used in in silico biophysical simulations to reproduce and analyze results from in vivo animal experiments, with the goal to reduce the need for experimentation on laboratory animals.
References
[edit]- ^ "The Virtual Family—development of surface-based anatomical models of two adults and two children for dosimetric simulations". Physics in Medicine & Biology. 55: N23. 17 December 2009 – via IOP SCIENCE.
- ^ "Development of a new generation of high-resolution anatomical models for medical device evaluation: the Virtual Population 3.0". Physics in Medicine & Biology. 59 (18): 5287. 21 August 2014 – via IOP SCIENCE.
- ^ "MIDA: A Multimodal Imaging-Based Detailed Anatomical Model of the Human Head and Neck". PLoS One. 10 (4): e0124126. April 22, 2015 – via PLOS One.
- ^ "IXI Dataset". Imperial College London. 8 May 2025. Retrieved 8 May 2025.