LaBS - Laboratory of In Silico Medicine

• subjectSkills

  The laboratory has two main research applications:

  1. Digital Patient: the creation of computational models for assisting in diagnosis, predicting prognosis, and simulating the effect of the available therapies in order to personalize the treatment, to describe the interaction between a medical product and a specific patient, to support medical decisions and procedure planning.
  2. In Silico Trials: the use of computational models to assess the safety and efficacy of new medical products on a virtual population.

  Virtual populations, tissues, and organs are obtained from the elaboration of medical images or clinical datasets. Medical device models are characterized and built to be used in modelling codes. Pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic models allow the in-silico reproduction of a digital twin of a patient and an understanding of how drugs can be administered, distributed, metabolized, and excreted in the human body. Being based on both anatomy and physiology of bodily functions, these models can find the optimal dose, the best administration path, and the timing to reach specific targets. In addition, the models are individualized to the patient’s features such as sex, age, weight, height, and if available other indicators of organ efficiency.

  The laboratory is memebr of the Virtual Physoliogical Human Institute.

• subjectResearch activities

  Research activities are mainly focused on the fields of:

  • Cardiovascular diseases. Examples, but not limited to, are aortic, cardiac, and valvular pathologies like aneurysms, dissections, ulceration, stenosis, calcification, and fibrillation.
  • Neurovascular diseases. Examples, but not limited to, are related to ischemic stroke, cerebral aneurysms, carotid stenosis and calcifications.
  • Musculoskeletal pathologies. Examples, but not limited to, are related to the patho-physiology of orthopaedic and spinal diseases, including traumas, deformities, degenerations (e.g. arthrosis and tumours), and their treatments using specific instrumentation techniques, even adopting novel custom-made 3D printed implants and scaffolds.
  • Pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics. They allow computing the optimal administration route and dose of specific medications as well as simulating how the same remedy behaves in a random population of individuals. The availability of quantitative deterministic models allows the development of model-based techniques for optimal dosages, optimal control of administration, and comparison of different treatments and formulations of active principles.