Plamen Ch. Ivanov, Ph.D., D.Sc.
Director of Keck Laboratory for Network Physiology
Department of Physics
Boston University
Seminar Information
The human organism is an integrated network where complex physiological systems continuously interact to optimize and coordinate their function. Organ-to-organ interactions occur at multiple levels and spatiotemporal scales to produce distinct physiologic states. Disrupting organ communications can lead to dysfunction of individual systems or to collapse of the entire organism. Yet, we do not know the nature of interactions among systems and sub-systems, and their collective role as a network in maintaining health.
We initiated a new interdisciplinary field, Network Physiology, which aims to address these fundamental questions. Through the prism of concepts and approaches from statistical and computational physics and nonlinear dynamics, we will present a new framework to identify and quantify dynamic networks of organ interactions. We focus on inferring coupling and dynamical interactions among organ systems from continuous streams of synchronized recordings of key physiologic parameters. In contrast to traditional complex networks theory, where edges/links are constant and represent static graphs of association, novel approaches in Network Physiology aim to establish dynamical aspects of organ communications in real time, to track the evolution of organ network interactions and quantify emerging collective network behaviors in response to changes in physiological state and condition.
We will report first findings utilizing this new framework to (i) investigate brain-brain network interactions across distinct brain rhythms and locations, and their relation to new aspects of neural plasticity in response to changes in physiologic state; (ii) characterize dynamical features of brain-organ communications as a new signature of neuroautonomic control; and (iii) establish basic principles underlying coordinated organ-organ communications. We will demonstrate how physiologic network topology and systems connectivity lead to integrated global behaviors representative of distinct states and functions. The presented investigations are initial steps in building a first Atlas of dynamic interactions among organ systems and the Human Physiolome, a new kind of Big Data of blue-print reference maps that uniquely represent physiologic states and functions under health and disease.
Acknowledgements: We acknowledge support from W M Keck Foundation, National Institutes of Health (NIH grant 1R01- HL098437), the Office of Naval Research (ONR grant 000141010078), the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF grant 2012219; BSF Grant 2020020).
Professor Ivanov, Ph.D., D.Sc., is Director of the Keck Laboratory for Network Physiology at Boston University, Associate Physiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Lecturer in Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
He has introduced innovative ways to analyze and model physiological systems, adapting and developing concepts and methods from modern statistical physics, nonlinear dynamics and networks theory. He has investigated the complex dynamics and underlying control mechanisms of a range of physiological systems, including studies on cardiac and respiratory dynamics, sleep-stage transitions, circadian rhythms, locomotion and brain dynamics, and has uncovered basic laws of physiologic regulation.
Professor Ivanov has pioneered the study of dynamic network interactions of physiological and organ systems. He is the originator and founder of the interdisciplinary field of Network Physiology. His current work focuses on developing methods of data analysis to investigate interactions among diverse organ systems and build a theoretical framework to understand how physiologic states and functions at the organism level emerge out of organ network interactions, and how diverse organ systems coordinate and integrate their functions to produce health or disease. His work lays the foundation of the Human Physiolome, a new type of BigData, containing streams of continuously recorded, high frequency, synchronized physiological signals under various states and clinical conditions, with an associated Atlas of network maps representing interactions among physiological systems at different levels in the human organism.
His discoveries have been broadly featured in the Media, including Scientific American, Science News, Nature Science Update, New Scientist, Physics World, Nature Medicine Research Highlights, Washington Post, Futurity Magazine, The Boston Globe.
Professor Ivanov is the Field Chief Editor of the journal Frontiers in Network Physiology. He is the founding Director of the International Summer Institute on Network Physiology (ISINP), Lake Como School of Advanced Study. Professor Ivanov is one of nine founding members of PhysioNet — the first NIH-sponsored data sharing research resource with millions of users and data downloads. He has served as editorial and advisory board member for several leading journals, including New Journal of Physics, EPL (Europhysics Letters), EPJ Nonlinear Biomedical Physics, Journal of Biological Physics (JOBP), Physiological Measurement and Frontiers in Physiology. His research has been funded by NIH, the W.M. Keck Foundation, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF).
For his pioneering applications of statistical physics and nonlinear dynamics to physiology and biomedicine, and for uncovering fundamental scaling and multifractal properties, self-organized criticality, sleep- and circadian-related phase transitions in physiologic dynamics, Professor Ivanov was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2010. He is recipient of the Sustained Research Excellence Award of the Biomedical Research Institute, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School (2009-2011); the Georgi Nadjakov Medal of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (2012), the Pythagoras (Pitagor) Prize for high achievements in interdisciplinary research bestowed by the President of Bulgaria (2014), and $ 1 milion W.M. Keck Foundation Award (2015).