VeryBoringAtParties

The Loophole is one of the best songs ever written.

Everyone knows it, nobody says, because they're pregnant!

I'm late to this and that makes me sad.

I'm a pulmonary epidemiologist and I spend way to much time thinking about the fiber structure of the lungs. Have you done any work on simulating the architectural micro/macro-structure that drives breathing? I'm consistently amazed at what we can derive from a chest CT in terms of the failure state of lungs in diseases such as COPD but all of that is driven by fractal lung development and the eventual tensegrity structure which we can observe as it fails but that we can only measure after death. So from a simulation perspective; does a virtual lung fiber network exist? Can you breath a virtual lung? Can you damage a virtual lung and see the results?

Thanks for any comment you care to make! Also I'm in 500 which is odd to me since I could probably just find your office and knock on your door in order to ask this question right?

Would you consider collaborating with Dan Lacey to create a brand new timeline composed of pancakes and love (and the pounding of various things)? https://www.etsy.com/shop/ThePainterOfPancakes

I interact with a few pharmaceutical companies because of my research and they're always after drug targets. A problem is phenotyping disease in such a way that they can target mechanisms with molecules. In the case of COPD there's good research being done on cellular and molecular problems that might translate to targets but the structural failures have to drive disease progression and that's difficult to model (or treat). That said, some folks have tried to model elastic response and failure using inhalation vs exhalation CT;

Computed Tomography Measure of Lung at Risk and Lung Function Decline in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.

Bhatt SP, Bodduluri S, Hoffman EA, Newell JD Jr, Sieren JC, Dransfield MT, Reinhardt JM; COPDGene Investigators.

Am J Respir Crit Care Med. 2017 Sep 1;196(5):569-576. doi: 10.1164/rccm.201701-0050OC

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And I'd think that having a virtual model of the full fiber architecture to put alongside the airway and vascular models would be a big step forward. If we had a virtual fiber network model of breathing then we could overlay emphysemous damage and predict where the extent of damage to the parenchyma might become damage to the fiber network and how that fiber network would work during respiration after that specific failure.