Tailor-made healthcare

New Zealand scientists use KAREN to revolutionalise the diagnosis and treatment of disease.

NZ leads new approach to disease diagnosis

KAREN is enabling international collaboration on the Auckland Bioengineering Institute's Physiome Project, where sophisticated mathematical models of all a human’s organs are being created. This leads to a new patient-specific approach to the diagnosis and treatment of disease. Information from a patient can be run through the model, helping doctors to provide treatment customised to the individual patient.

KAREN delivers healthcare of the future

Headed by Rutherford Medal winner, Professor Peter Hunter, the Physiome Project makes use of advanced tools over KAREN to collaborate with partners at the Maurice Wilkins Centre and Institute of Mathematics in NZ, and with the University of Oxford, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“By leading this ground-breaking biomedical research, NZ is best placed to reap the healthcare benefits, meaning more sophisticated health services and healthier communities – KAREN enables us to do this” Professor Hunter.

Marking up the human body

Webinars and video conferencing using EVO over KAREN puts collaborators of supporting projects - the Cardiac Atlas project (mapping the heart) and CellML - in touch.

“We make active use of EVO over KAREN for collaboration with our American colleagues at the UCLA,” said Randall Britten, Bioengineering Software Development Group Leader, University of Auckland. “For our CellML Workshop 2010 we set up a webinar via EVO, and this was a huge success. Speakers presented their work remotely, some of which we recorded so that they can be viewed for reference, or by people who could not attend.”

Developed by the Auckland Bioengineering Institute and partners, the open standard-based CellML markup language makes the sharing of these models across the science community easy.

About the Auckland Bioengineering Institute

The Auckland Bioengineering Institute was founded in 2001 by Professor Peter Hunter, after he developed the world's first anatomically-based computer model of the human heart. Today the institute has 140 researchers, including 60 postgraduate students. The institute works in close collaboration with the Maurice Wilkins Centre and the New Zealand Institute of Mathematics, and with many international partners, including the University of Oxford, UCLA, and MIT.

More information

Physiome Project at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute
CellML Project at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute
EVO video collaboration tool at BeSTGRID

[Image: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net]