So far, the liver is treated as a single "black box" in simulations conducting pharmacokinetic studies. To simulate in a new way, a liver was divided into approximately 50,000 virtual cubes. "For the first time, our method can simulate what inside of the organ is actually happening," said Preusser in a today´s press release. In humans around 90 liters of blood flow per hour is flowing through the organ. To simulate in detail how this blood flows through the liver  and how the containing active ingredients in it react, so far the researchers still have used a mouse organ for the reproduction of a high-resolution 3D image. However, in a next step, the researchers want to simulate a human liver.

On the basis of the image data primarily they reconstructed the precise structure of the fine branched vascular system. In order to keep the computation time within reasonable limits, the behavior of several thousand cells were subsumed in each cube. To support the data the researchers can resort to a rich data base from biomedical research that describes the metabolic behavior of liver cells. Blood streams and metabolic responses to drugs such as with fatty liver or liver damage could be studied in detail on the screen in this way.

The researchers have published their development in the journal "PLOS Computational Biology".

Original paper:
Schwen, LO, Krauss, M, Niederalt, C , Gremse, F, Kiessling, F et al. (2014) : Spatio - Temporal Simulation of First Pass Drug perfusion in the Liver . PLoS Comput Biol 10 (3): e1003499. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003499

Source (in German):
http://www.innovations-report.de/html/berichte/medizintechnik/virtueller-blutfluss.html