Li Nicole Y K, Verdolini Katherine, Clermont Gilles, Mi Qi, Rubinstein Elaine N, Hebda Patricia A, Vodovotz Yoram
Department of Communication Science and Disorders, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2008 Jul 30;3(7):e2789. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0002789.
The development of personalized medicine is a primary objective of the medical community and increasingly also of funding and registration agencies. Modeling is generally perceived as a key enabling tool to target this goal. Agent-Based Models (ABMs) have previously been used to simulate inflammation at various scales up to the whole-organism level. We extended this approach to the case of a novel, patient-specific ABM that we generated for vocal fold inflammation, with the ultimate goal of identifying individually optimized treatments. ABM simulations reproduced trajectories of inflammatory mediators in laryngeal secretions of individuals subjected to experimental phonotrauma up to 4 hrs post-injury, and predicted the levels of inflammatory mediators 24 hrs post-injury. Subject-specific simulations also predicted different outcomes from behavioral treatment regimens to which subjects had not been exposed. We propose that this translational application of computational modeling could be used to design patient-specific therapies for the larynx, and will serve as a paradigm for future extension to other clinical domains.
个性化医疗的发展是医学界的主要目标，资金和注册机构也日益重视这一目标。建模通常被视为实现这一目标的关键支持工具。基于主体的模型（ABM）此前已被用于在从各个尺度直至全生物体水平模拟炎症。我们将这种方法扩展到了一种新型的、针对个体患者的ABM，该模型是我们为声带炎症生成的，最终目标是确定个体化的优化治疗方案。ABM模拟重现了遭受实验性发声创伤的个体在受伤后长达4小时的喉部分泌物中炎症介质的轨迹，并预测了受伤后24小时炎症介质的水平。针对个体的模拟还预测了受试者未接受过的行为治疗方案的不同结果。我们认为，这种计算建模的转化应用可用于设计针对喉部的个体化疗法，并将成为未来扩展到其他临床领域的范例。
