Scope & Mission

The human organism is an integrated network, where multi-component organ systems, each with its own regulatory mechanism, continuously interact to coordinate their function. Physiological interactions occur at multiple levels and spatio-temporal scales to produce distinct physiologic states, e.g. wake and sleep, consciousness and unconsciousness. Disrupting organ communications can lead to dysfunction of individual systems or collapse of the entire organism, as observed under clinical conditions such as sepsis, coma and multiple organ failure. Yet, despite its importance to basic physiologic functions, the nature of interactions between diverse organ systems and sub-systems, and their collective role in maintaining health is not known. Basic Physiology and clinical medicine widely employ a reductionist approach and traditionally consider health and disease through the prism of the structural organization and dynamics of individual organ systems Further, there are no adequate analytic tools and theoretical framework to probe these interactions.

Despite the vast progress and achievements in systems biology and integrative physiology in the last decades, we do not know the basic principles and mechanisms through which diverse physiological systems and organs dynamically interact and integrate their functions to generate a variety of physiologic states at the organism level.

Frontiers in Network Physiology aims to address this fundamental question. In addition to defining health and disease through structural, dynamical and regulatory changes in individual physiological systems, the new conceptual framework of Network Physiology focuses on the coordination and network interactions among diverse organ systems and sub-systems as a hallmark of physiologic state and function.

Novel concepts and approaches derived from recent advances in network theory, coupled dynamical systems, statistical and computational physics, signal processing and biological engineering show promise to provide new insights into the complexity of physiological structure and function in health and disease, bridging sub-cellular level signaling with inter-cellular interactions and communications among integrated organ systems and sub-systems. These advances form first building blocks in the methodological formalism and theoretical framework necessary to address the problems and challenges in the field of Network Physiology.

This new field integrates empirical and theoretical approaches across disciplines with the aim to understand in different contexts, from extensive data analysis and modeling to the clinical practice, how diverse physiological systems and sub-systems dynamically interact to produce health and disease. Researchers involved in the field have broad range of backgrounds from physics and applied mathematics to neuroscience, physiology and medicine, covering a range of physiological systems from the cellular to the organ level. 

The field involves also the development of novel biomedical device platforms for synchronized high-frequency recordings from multiple physiological systems in ICU/hospital and ambulatory environment, and a new kind of Big Data, the Human Physiolome, containing large-scale signals from multiple systems and an associated Atlas of hundreds of network maps representing physiological systems interactions during different states and clinical conditions. New machine learning and AI algorithms have to be developed to classify states, functions and conditions based on network physiology maps from populations of subjects. 

There are multiple sub-areas and directions in the field of Network Physiology:

    • theory of networks of dynamical systems

    • brain and neuronal dynamics

    • tissues and cell assemblies

    • pair-wise and network interactions of organ systems and sub-systems

    • physiological interactions in coma and traumatic brain injury

    • concussion

    • cardiac arrest

    • neurodegenerative disorders

    • sleep disorders

    • neonatal care

    • advanced methods from non-linear dynamics to synchronization phenomena.

The new journal will address a diverse community across a broad range of disciplines and fields from basic physiology and clinical medicine to neuroscience, biomedical engineering , AI and applied math.

Submission

Frontiers in Network Physiology is composed of the following Specialty Sections:

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