Progress with Multiscale Systems

Abstract

Biomedical engineers and clinical scientists tend to focus their research on one level of scale, be it in the domain of biochemistry, cell biology or anatomy. However, there is increasing interest in a multiscale systems approach which attempts to integrate models of behaviour between different levels of scale to gain understanding of emergent effects. This is a return to physiological medicine with a computational emphasis, exemplified by the worldwide Physiome initiative and the European Union-funded Network of Excellence in the Virtual Physiological Human. The paper demonstrates progress on initial work on how a multiscale systems approach can represent the complex processes involved in heart valve development. Such an effort enables the integration of multiscale metrology.