It is our pleasure to announce that the SIMCor Virtual Research Environment (VRE), now integrated with all their components, modules and interfaces in their latest version, is finally online and accessible to the in-silico medicine research community and beyond. 

The SIMCor VRE represents the computational platform designed and implemented during the project for the design, conduction, and result analysis of in-silico clinical trials, with a focus on modelling and simulation to assess the conformity, safety, and efficacy of cardiovascular devices.

The platform has been developed by the Transilvania University of Brasov (UTBV) on top of its cloud-based infrastructure, with the support of the Eindhoven University of Technology (TUE) and the European Clinical Research Infrastructure Network (ECRIN) for 2 specific components, the Virtual Cohort Generator (VCG) and the R-Statistical Environment for in-silico trials, respectively.

The VRE is in fact structured in 4 components with diversified functions, as illustrated below:

1. The VRE Drive, a data repository and interoperability environment for the exchange of data among the various VRE components;
2. The VCG for the generation of a new population of virtual patients, based on a set of characteristics provided as input parameters. The resulting patient data (e.g., anatomical geometries and virtual cohort features) can be stored in the VRE Drive. 
3. The TAVI Device Implantation module can be used to perform a low-fidelity simulation of a TAVI device implantation in the target virtual cohort based on a fast-to-evaluate model and visualise the transient simulation in ParaView. 
4. The R-Statistical Environment, an application developed on R-Shiny, can be used to design and conduct in-silico trials, data analysis and statistics computations on the resulting virtual cohort and implantation simulation.

Computationally demanding high-fidelity simulations, for example finite-element (FE) simulations, can be run on local environments using the VRE Drive data as input and then analysed through the R-Statistical Environment.

The platform can be accessed here: SIMCor VRE. Any interested user can register for R&D purpose only. The team at UTBV will evaluate the request and grant authorised users access to the platform and its resources.

These resources include:

• Virtual cohorts of (1) aortic valve disease patients, (2) heart failure patients and (3) healthy pigs;
• SOPs and guidelines for (1) data acquisition, (2) data processing, (3) virtual cohort generation and validation, (4) in-silico analysis, (5) validation and (6) documentation for in-silico studies.

The platform supports device validation along the whole research & development (R&D) pipeline: from initial modelling and in-vitro experiments to animal studies, as well as virtual device implantation and effect simulation on virtual human cohorts. Although other use cases can be assessed via the platform, the project focused on device implantation and effect simulations for 2 representative applications: transcatheter aortic valve replacement valves (TAVI) and a new pulmonary artery pressure sensor (PAPS) developed by our consortium partner Biotronik (BIO).

The SIMCor innovative virtual cohort technology allows for the generation and exposure of new or existing devices to a range of clinically realistic and diversified anatomies and (patho)physiological conditions, supporting the critical needs of testing devices on a population with a large variation in phenotypes, and on patient groups covering rare diseases, exceptions, or outliers and investigate high-priority safety, efficacy, and usability endpoints, such as device migration, perforation of thrombosis.

The platform will also be part of the Catalogue – to be published by the end of 2024 – of the EDITH platform, the repository of data, models and virtual human twins developed by the namesake Horizon Europe Coordination and Support Action, that is responsible for building the European Virtual Human Twin.