PASC17 Conference to Focus on HPC & Precision Medicine

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medicineToday the PASC17 Conference announced a track focused on Precision Medicine as Special Topic for Emerging Domains.

Precision medicine, also referred to as personalized medicine, is an emerging domain that is adding tremendous value to the study of life sciences and medical treatment. The requirements that it has for rapid – and secure – processing, analysis and management of vast quantities of data in a wide range of different medical environments make precision medicine ideally suited to high performance computing.

Authors are invited to submit proposals for minisymposia, papers and poster contributions on the special topic, and the other scientific tracks, according to the calls for submissions published on the PASC17 conference website. Submissions to the precision medicine track will be reviewed by Dr. Martin Weiser (track chair, ZIB Berlin), Prof. Tim Conrad (Freie Universität Berlin), Dr. Esra Neufeld (ETH Zurich), Prof. Gernot Plank (Medical University of Graz), and Prof. Amanda Randles (Duke University).

Due to inter-individual differences in genomic, physiologic, and pathologic situation, patients respond in different ways to certain treatments. Precision medicine aims at a rational customization of medical treatments to specific patient groups or even individual patients beyond a trial and error approach. This includes clinical decision making, adaptation of medical devices or protocols to the patient, and the development and administration of drugs.

pascFunctional models allow for the simulation of therapies and to predict disease progression and response to treatment options. The processes to be modeled range from the molecular scale (binding of drugs to specific receptors, stochasticity of enzymatic reactions) over cell and tissue scale (gene expression and regulatory mechanisms) up to the organ scale (pharmacology, physiology, and biomechanics). Precision medicine is therefore challenged with complex multi-scale and multi-physics models calling for advanced computing methods and high performance systems.

Corresponding to the range of processes involved, a multitude of computational methodologies are used in precision medicine. This includes solvers for ordinary and partial differential equations, Monte-Carlo sampling and high-dimensional discretizations for both uncertainty quantification and simulating stochastic differential equations, optimization methods for parameter identification and therapy planning, and image and geometry processing.

In this video from the PASC16 conference, Torsten Hoefler from ETH Zurich describes the ACM PASC Papers Program.

The PASC17 Conference, co-sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), will be held June 26-28, 2017 in Lugano, Switzerland.

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