For decades, simulation-based learning has been central to medical education, providing students with a safe and controlled environment to practice essential skills. However, traditional models often fall short in accurately mirroring the complexity of human physiology. Enter AIBODY, a game-changing platform that simulates human physiology from the cellular level up. By modeling biochemical and biophysical processes in real time, AIBODY delivers unparalleled precision, offering transformative possibilities for education, research, and personalized medicine.
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Throughout history, simulation-based learning has been a mainstay of healthcare education and professional medical training, used to prepare students for treating patients in an effective, professional, and safe manner. But even though the technology that makes healthcare simulations possible continues to evolve, traditional, top-down simulation models that dominate the field remain limited in their ability to accurately capture real-world clinical situations. They tend to lack the depth needed to realistically replicate the complex and interconnected nature of human physiology, and flexibility to recreate and respond in real time to a broad range of scenarios found in a clinical setting. These shortcomings limit the models’ utility to learners, making it harder to transfer skills acquired through simulation to actual patient care.
Now imagine a radically new approach, one that simulates human physiology from the bottom up, rather than the top down. An approach that starts from the “first principles” of biology, modeling physiological functions at the subcellular level and accurately capturing the dynamic, nonlinear and interconnected processes occurring within the human organism.
This new approach is behind AIBODY’s general-purpose model of human physiology.
A product of over a decade of research and development, this groundbreaking model consists of more than 132,000 distinct parameters that continuously recalculate every few milliseconds to deliver real-time, high-resolution simulations that replicate the underlying complexity of human physiology.
Unlike traditional models that oversimplify physiological systems, AIBODY’s simulations start at the subcellular level and build upward to tissue, organs, systems and ultimately organism level in a way that is strictly rules-driven and rooted in scientific research. This allows AIBODY to integrate models of the cardiovascular, endocrine, and nervous systems, creating the most versatile bio-platform of its kind. This unprecedented level of precision and versatility holds promise for a broad range of applications in education, medical devices, pharmaceutical research, personalized medicine, and preventive health.
As an example, several major universities already use AIBODY’s simulation-based interactive medical education tool to simplify the teaching of complex concepts, speed up student learning, and replicate hands-on clinical experience without sacrificing accuracy.
Building a digital human, one cell at a time.
At the core of AIBODY’s platform lies a proprietary Cell Module. The AIBODY science and technology team spent six years modelling biochemical and biophysical cellular activity. The culmination of this work has yielded a unique system that can mimic multiple human cell types by calibrating several specific cellular attributes.
These biochemistry-based models of cells are at the core of AIBODY’s representation of tissues, organs, and systems of organs. Each digital cell within the model can communicate with other cells by transfer of electrical impulses (heart or nerve tissue) and by hormonal signaling through the modeling of cell-surface receptors.
By using this novel approach, AIBODY is able to represent highly detailed biological and physical principles. Fully resolving the simulation at the subcellular and cellular levels lays a strong foundation which captures the true mechanisms of physiological functions. Building on this, through a proprietary agent-based approach, the model incorporates nonlinear dynamics, allowing for the representation of complex interactions and feedback loops, where small changes can create significant effects across the system.
A key advantage of this model is its inclusion of homeostatic feedback mechanisms, enabling the simulation to adapt and maintain stability naturally, without relying on pre-programmed responses.
Architecting the system in this way allows real-time responsiveness to various stimuli and conditions, with continuous recalculations that reflect the fluidity of real-life physiological processes and produce natural, organic responses when simulating the effects of drugs, medical devices, or surgical interventions.
Breaking Bread: Biochemistry Model
One great example of the power of AIBODY’s model is in its biochemistry. This provides unparalleled depth in biochemical simulation by moving away from simplified lumped parameter models. Instead, AIBODY programs, in computer code, each stage in the chain of biochemical transformations, which occur in a cell. Most crucially, the model allows the performance of enzymes to be adjusted, a capability which delivers a level of sophistication and accuracy unmatched in pathology simulation.
Let’s take glucose catabolism as an example and assume that the AIBODY virtual organism has just consumed a slice of bread.
AIBODY’s model covers the full spectrum of biochemistry, simulating the complete process from initial ingestion of the bread and the starch breakdown into glucose, through the complete Krebs cycle and all the way to ATP synthesis.
In contrast, in a traditional top-down model the glucose catabolism would be described through a transformation coefficient with the use of a simple equation. This simplifies the simulation process greatly but entirely omits the chain of reactions.
Generating electrical activity
Another key advantage of the subcellular approach is the ability to develop a sophisticated cell membrane model through which AIBODY replicates action potential, enabling realistic simulations of electrophysiological activity. This model simulates the generation of electric discharges through ion concentration shifts across a cell membrane, reflecting real-life electrophysiological principles.
AIBODY’s cell membrane model comprises of four components working in unison:
1. Lipid bilayer: Establishes potential differences across the membrane using a dielectric model.
2. Ion channels: Simulates the selective permeability of sodium, potassium, and calcium ions through fully adjustable, ion-specific channels.
3. Ion pumps: Generates concentration gradients by transporting potassium ions into cells and sodium ions out, powered by metabolic energy based on the final component below.
4. Energy recovery: Maintains ionic gradients using ATP, produced from nutrient catabolism (e.g., from bread ingestion in the earlier example). The energy transfer process is intricately modeled, showing ATP consumption powering ion pumping, ADP formation, and ion exchange.
Advancing Innovation in Health Simulation
The above examples and illustrations of AIBODY’s biochemistry and electrophysiology models showcase the depth and sophistication of its underlying bio-platform, the first to offer high-resolution simulations of the entire human body.
The ability to dynamically simulate adjustments in each enzyme’s performance or – for example – to change the permeability of ion channels, with the effects of these changes propagating throughout the whole organism, is an immensely powerful capability that is unique to AIBODY and not found in traditional, top-down simulation models.
This capacity to replicate human physiological processes and pathologies in a highly accurate, dynamic manner puts AIBODY in a strong position to facilitate breakthroughs in medical education, pharmaceutical and medical device research, and personalized health.
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