The Experimental Man: Modeling David

David's data by itself provided a potentially confusing picture about his cardiovascular risk. This data, however, was key for us to create a virtual representation of David in the Entelos Cardiovascular PhysioLab® computer model. A PhysioLab model is like a flight simulator but for the body. It includes the key physiology involved in a disease and lets scientists try "what if" questions to help understand how disease processes may be unfolding within a patient and how best to treat them.

The Cardiovascular PhysioLab model incorporates the physiology involved with cardiovascular disease, including cholesterol metabolism, inflammation, atherosclerotic plaque formation, and how plaque rupture can lead to a heart attack. This model includes thousands of virtual people, each a little bit different in their underlying physiology, in what we call a virtual population.

We encoded David's data into a "Virtual Human Profile" that allowed us to pick the people in the virtual population that looked most like David. That collection of virtual people acts as David's personal health simulation in the model and how those virtual people respond gives us a prediction of what David's health future might be.