BioDynaMo - Building the future today (workshop hosted by the SCImPULSE Foundation and the Italian Society of Telemedicine)

 On March 11th 2023, we had the pleasure of meeting the community of Italian doctors and researchers behind the Italian Society of Telemedicine (a scientific Society accredited at the Italian Ministry of Health, and thus in the capacity of emanating guidelines, with some legally binding authority attached, around the practices of digital medicine)

In Bologna the weather was splendid, and nevertheless the venue has been constantly full and bustling, a testament to the interest provoked by the scientific program overall

It's been refreshing to meet such a diverse community of practitioners, and to discuss with them about the opportunities and pitfalls of the quickly evolving European ecosystem around digital health. So many interesting and provoking ideas have been shared and discussed, about familial application scenarios (accelerating novel medical device engineering, like organs-on-chip and hybrid personalized organoids), and some that we hadn't thought about yet (planning and auditing management decisions, risk quantification and moderating strategy testing for complex social/information attacks)... we come back with connections and promises to reiterate and deepen conversations that could significantly enrich our impact.

A nice side note, despite the crowd being technically savvy and future looking overall, our session had apparently attracted the youngest portion of the public, and it was possible to spot several students and specialists in training from the University Hospitals of Bologna and Parma among the crowd... "building the future today" had a deep meaning in this encounter.

However, despite any attendance of around 800 people (or so we heard from the organizing committee), if you are reading this chances are you could not be in Bologna... thus, we are delighted to share with you recordings of our lectures:

1) By our Spokesperson, Dr Roman Bauer of the University of Surrey, an excursus on the potential of applying computational models to improve our understanding of human health and disease, with direct impact on diagnosis, in his lecture titled "Learning how to improve diagnosis of, and think about, human diseases with computational models"

2) By  our Technical Coordinator, Prof Vasileios Vavourakis of the University of Cyprus, an in depth look at applications of computational modelling to real world challenges met in medical research and life sciences, emphasising the flexibility and performances that a user can tap from when adopting BioDynaMo, in his lecture titled  "BioDynaMo, a high performance suite to apply agent based simulations to realworld challenge"

We are now back to our offices, and already thinking about how to turn all the energies shared during this meeting into work with impact on the lives of citizens everywhere. 

Let's get/remain in touch, because as it was said during the meeting: if you want to go quick, go alone... but if you want to go far, go together!

Just a last word, to thank SCImPULSE Foundation for making this meeting possible. We look forward to many more in the next future, so stay tuned!