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HumMod-Golem Edition: large scale model of integrative physiology for virtual patient simulators

Publication at First Faculty of Medicine |
2013

Abstract

n teaching medical decision-making, comprehensive training simulators are of great importance. These must include models of various physiological subsystems, and also integrate them into a comprehensive whole.

Medical simulators have recently become a highly sought-after commercial commodity. Like an airline pilot simulator, a medical simulator is controlled by a remote operator, who manipulates the simulated patient and chooses between various scenarios to simulate different maladies.

The core of a medical training simulator is a complex model of the human body‘s internal physiological regulators, connected with a hardware simulator. Its detailed structure (the system of equations and the parameter values that feed into them) is usually not published, becoming a carefully-protected piece of trade secrets There are also open source models of integrated physiological systems.

One is a large model by Coleman et al. called HumMod (http://hummod.org) implemented by thousands of XML files. Our implementation of this model in the Modelica language has brought a much easier description of the simulated complex physiological relationships than XML implementation.

We uncovered several mistakes in the original model, and we have modified and expanded the original model (particularly in modelling acid-base homeostasis). Our new model is called HumMod - Golem Edition (http://physiome.cz/ hummod), and will provide a new theoretical basis for medical training simulator.

In its implementa