http://www.armytimes.com/news/2013/03/TSJ-030813-peck-physiology-army/

By Michael Peck - Staff writer Posted : Tuesday Mar 12, 2013 12:20:40 EDT

An open-source physiology engine that anyone can use to develop medical simulations is being developed by the U.S. Armys Telemedicine & Advanced Technology Research Center.

Its not altruism thats spurring the $7 million PhACTS (Physiologically Accurate Community-based platform for Training Systems) project. Rather, TATRC hopes that the new engine will enable the public to develop medical simulations that will benefit military as well as civilian medicine.

We thought if we had an engine that we could give away freely to everybody, it would make it a lot easier for everyone to experiment with the simulations that use them, and make it less expensive for people to develop their own novel things, said Thomas Talbot, chief scientist at TATRCs Armed Forces Simulation Institute for Medicine. Current physiology simulations are either oriented toward university research, or are only available as expensive commercial products.

But TATRC is paying contractor Applied Research Associates, which won the project in February, for open-source licensing of a product that ARA will own, but that the public can download from a Web site.

People could use this for their own for-profit products, said Talbot, a former Army pediatrician turned medical simulations researcher.

PhACTS will be based on an existing ARA physiology engine called HumanSim.

It will be based on a common data model that will create standard inputs and outputs, making it easy to extend this format to additional models. The platform will be modular and extensible, said ARA researcher Rachel Clipp. PhACTS will not generate fancy visuals of the human body, other than simple graphics like an electrocardiogram. What it will do is provide the underlying models so a medical simulation can realistically depict how the body responds to various stimuli such as drugs.

Though PhACTS will be dual-use, it will also contain specific military features, such as modeling blast injuries. Perhaps just as important, the physiology engine will include plug-ins for various game engines, including Unreal and Unity.

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Army making open-source physiology engine