System Approaches to Quantify Health and Diseases
- LecturerMr. Chung-Kang Peng (National Central University and Harvard Medical School)
Host: Wen-Liang Hwang - Time2012-12-19 (Wed.) 10:30 ~ 12:00
- LocationAuditorium 106 at new IIS Building
Abstract
In recent years, technologies enable us to collect overwhelming amount of signals in our patients. As a result, it becomes possible to quantify health and diseases of human body from an integrative system viewpoint. However, conventional biomedical research tools that have been developed with reductionist theory may not be appropriate. Mainly because these tools typically focus on individual components of the whole system, while ignoring important nonlinear interactions among different components of the system.
Research in physics and applied mathematics in recent years on complex systems with multiple nonlinear interacting components yield remarkable insights into these systems. In particular, it is shown that the dynamics of how a system changes in time contains significant information about the system itself. In this talk, I will introduce a general framework to study physiologic fluctuations. With this framework, we can derive useful measures that best reflect the emergent properties of the integrative systems, and to identify system-level behaviors that are critical to our understanding of a healthy system and its pathological perturbations. This new approach has a wide range of biomedical applications that will be discussed briefly in this talk.