News Story

EU funds VPH-Share project to advance medical informatics

John Domingue, Monday 6 Dec 2010

KMi is a partner in the newly funded VPH-Share project (Virtual Physiological Human: Sharing for Healthcare – A Research Environment), an EU Framework 7 integrating project. VPH-Share will begin in March 2011 and run for four years, with total funding from the EU of ï¿½10.7 million. The Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) is a vision for the integration of scientific models for understanding the human body, with researchers and clinicians able to draw on diverse data sets and simulation processes to describe and predict the health of individuals and populations. VPH-Share will provide the essential services and the computational infrastructure necessary for the sharing of clinical and research data and tools, facilitating the construction and operation of new VPH workflows, and collaborations between the members of the VPH community. It builds on prior projects including Living Human Digital Library (in which KMi was a partner), @neurIST, euHeart, VPHOP, and Virolab. Data sources include clinical data from individual patients, such as medical images or biomedical signals, and population information. The VPH-Share infrastructure will provide operations on this data ranging from secure access and storage through annotation, data inference and assimilation, to complex image processing and physics-based mathematical modelling, data reduction and representation. VPH-Share brings together twenty-one partners, led by the University of Sheffield. Other members include the Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and the Istituto Ortopedico Rizzoli, the universities of Auckland, Vienna, and Amsterdam, University College London and King’s College London, and the Technical University of Eindhoven, and major technology companies such as Atos Origin, Philips Electronics, and IBM. KMi will lead the semantic Web services work within the project.