CompBioMed e-Seminar #26

CompBioMed’s 26th e-seminar took place on 2 September 2022 and focused on Phase III In Silico Trials of new treatments for osteoporosis using exascale computers.

In this seminar Prof Viceconti reviews the challenges we are facing in transforming a digital twin in healthcare solution called BoBCAT, which predict the force required to fracture any bone from a CT dataset of the subject, into BoneStrength, a full-blown In Silico Trial to simulate phase III clinical trials of new anti-resorptive drugs, medicines prescribed to treat osteoporosis.
He introduces the computational structure of BoBCATand quickly review its extensive technical and clinical validation. Then he reports on the use of statistical atlases to expand a collection of 100 patient-specific models into a cohort of over 1000 virtual patients. He describes the calculation of the Absolute Risk of Fracture at time zero, the disease progression model, and how they are now using Markov Chain Monte Carlo to provide a more realistic simulation of an actual clinical trial.

Presentation was given by Prof Marco Viceconti (University of Bologna). He has a PhD in Bioengineering and has been developing In Silico Medicine technologies for over 20 years. He is full professor of Industrial Bioengineering at the Alma Mater Studiorum-University of Bologna, and Director of the Medical Technology Lab at the Rizzoli research hospital. Before he founded and led for seven years the Insigneo Institute for In Silico Medicine at the University of Sheffield (UK).

This webinar series was run in collaboration with the VPH Institute and the Avicenna Alliance