INVITED PAPER China Physiome Project: A Comprehensive Framework for Anatomical and Physiological Databases From the China Digital Human and the Visible Rat Information on computer models, based on detailed color photo images of human and rat body parts and calculated radiological dosimeter data, is now available in standardized format. By Dao Han , Qian Liu, and Qingming Luo ABSTRACT | The connection study between biological struc- ture and function, as well as between anatomical data and mechanical or physiological models, has been of increasing significance with the rapid advancement in experimental physiology and computational physiology. The China Physiome Project (CPP) is dedicated in optimization of the connection exploration based on standardization and integration of the structural datasets and their derivatives of cryosectional images with various standards, collaboration mechanisms, and online services. The CPP framework hereby incorporates the three-dimensional anatomical models of human and rat anatomy, the finite-element models of whole-body human skeleton, and the multiparticle radiological dosimetry data of both the human and rat computational phantoms. The ontology of CPP was defined using MeSH and, with its all standardized models description implemented by M3L, a multiscale model- ing language based on XML. Provided services based on Wiki concept include collaboration research, modeling version control, data sharing, online analysis of M3L documents. As a sample case, a multiscale model for human heart modeling, in which familial hypertrophic cardiomyopathy was studied according to the structure-function relations from genetic level to organ level, is integrated into the framework and given for demonstration of the functionality of multiscale physiological modeling based on CPP. KEYWORDS | China Digital Human; database; markup language; Physiome Project; Visible Rat phantom; Wiki I. INTRODUCTION Research in physiomes was intended to provide a Bquantitative description of physiological dynamics and functional behaviors of the intact organism[ [1]–[3], which is a major definition directing the development of the physiome ever since. At present, the concept has been embraced by numbers of scientists and institutions all over the world. Fundamental contributions, for instance, the IUPS Physiome [4], US Physiome [5], and EuroPhysiome [6], etc., are all dedicated to developing an integrated framework for organizing, encoding, and exchanging Manuscript received February 28, 2009; revised June 8, 2009 and August 1, 2009. Current version published November 18, 2009. This work was supported by the National High-Tech Research and Development Program of China under 2006AA02Z343 and by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 10875047. The authors are with the Britton Chance Center for Biomedical Photonics, Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China (e-mail: dhan@mail.hust.edu.cn; qianliu@mail.hust.edu.cn; qliu.hust@gmail.com; qluo@mail.hust.edu.cn). Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/JPROC.2009.2031667 Vol. 97, No. 12, December 2009 | Proceedings of the IEEE 1969 0018-9219/$26.00 Ó2009 IEEE