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The Virtual Liver: Modeling Chemical-Induced Liver Toxicity
Citation:
SHAH, I. A. The Virtual Liver: Modeling Chemical-Induced Liver Toxicity. Presented at Biocomplexity Meeting, Bloomington, IN, October 26 - 27, 2009.
Impact/Purpose:
This talk will outline some of the issues we faced in representing the relevant information about cellular phenomena in chemical-induced hepatocarcinogenesis and how we used Semantic Web tools to encode this information in the v-Liver Knowledgebase (v-Liver-KB).
Description:
The US EPA Virtual Liver (v-Liver) project is aimed at modeling chemical-induced processes in hepatotoxicity and simulating their dose-dependent perturbations. The v-Liver embodies an emerging field of research in computational tissue modeling that integrates molecular and cellular scales to simulate adverse outcomes. At its current phase of development v-Liver is a cellular systems model of a complex liver acinus: parenchymal and non-parenchymal cells represented as autonomous biological entities (“agents”) connected and spatially organized according to lobular morphology. The tissue microenvironment is dynamically modeled with portal to centrilobular blood flow. Each agent autonomously processes local inputs from the tissue microenvironment using biological rules to generate a response. The rules underlying agent responses are derived from prior knowledge on hepatocyte (HC) and Kupffer cell (KC) physiology. This work was reviewed by EPA and approved for publication but does not necessarily reflect official agency policy.