Minisymposium (ID: SS-MMHP)

The Human Placenta: Data Acquisition, Analysis, And Modeling

Dimitri Vvedensky (Imperial College London), Simon Morgan (Imperial College London)

The placenta is the interface across which all oxygen and nutrients are exchanged between mother and fetus. Understanding the development, structure and function of the human placenta is crucial to gaining insight into the environment of the developing fetus, whose health is thought to be an important influence on childhood and lifelong health.

The modeling of the human placenta presents a particularly challenging task because of the nature of the data required to assess the efficacy of any model. Several approaches have been taken, ranging from the study of shapes and morphology (macroscopic), to the structure and function of the vasculature (mesoscopic), and the diffusional oxygen transport in terminal villi (microscopic).

This minisymposium addresses several key issues in the acquisition, analysis and modeling of data from the human placenta. As the ultimate goal is to make clinically relevant statements, , there needs to be enough data to obtain meaningful statistics. But with data acquisition becoming increasingly difficult with the resolution of the models, new imaging techniques and imaging processing and methods of data mining must be brought to bear. The invited speakers in this symposium will address data acquisition, modeling the vascular network and other aspects of modeling. The symposium will conclude with an overview of the current state-of-affairs and point to directions of future research.