About this Research Topic

Background

This Research Topic is part of the Advanced HPC-based Computational Modeling in Biomechanics and Systems Biology series:
Advanced HPC-based Computational Modeling in Biomechanics and Systems Biology, Volume II

This Research Topic is at the very frontier of the Frontiers in Physiology. We look for papers written by Computational Biomechanics (CB) and Systems Biology (SB) researchers that develop High Performance Computing based (HPC-based) computational techniques, whose readers should be biomedical researchers with the potential of becoming users of these tools. This difference between the writers (computational scientists) and the readers (biomedical researchers) we encourage, makes this research topic completely unique amongst bio-oriented journals, both in its scope and interest.

As scientific journals are usually written and read by the same kind of researchers, computational bio-medical researchers face two exclusive alternatives. On the one hand, you submit your papers to a computational mechanics journal, with its own technical jargon and scope, presenting some bio-like examples. In these journals, the reviewers want to see the computational methods rigorously and thoroughly described, with all the mathematical and programming issues exposed. On the other hand, you submit your papers to a biomedical journal, where the reviewers want to see, above all, "clinical" demonstrations that your methods are useful. Most of the times, these journals plainly reject papers because of a supposed lack of "patient-specificity", forcing the computational scientists to drift from their original and well-planned research line, to present somewhat premature results on "patients" without sound verification on computational issues, with extreme simplifications, using inefficient though perhaps accurate computational concepts, etc.

Although these two options are completely valid and up and running at full speed, we propose to complement the biomedical scientific communication system with a disruptive third alternative:
- A research topic written by computational scientists addressing biomedical researchers, published in a high-impact physiology journal. This means that papers must be carefully and clearly written to show what are the biomedical problems addressed by the proposed computational methods and how it is proposed to tackle them.
- A research topic with rigorously and clearly written papers full of biomedical examples, but where the obsession for clinical results do not put at risk on going computational work, especially in extremely complex multi-scale and multi-physics situations. In such problems, well before thinking about "patient-specificity" we plainly need to "understand" what we do.
- A really multidisciplinary research topic, where Computational Biomechanics and Systems Biology papers can be found. We will very especially welcome papers that address the link between CB and SB.
- A research topic where the most advanced computational techniques are used to simulate and analyze biomedical problems, both in the form of High Performance Computing and High Performance Data Analytics, very especially welcoming papers that address the integration of both HPC and HPDA.

Keywords: Computational biomechanics, Computational Systems Biology, Bioinformatics, High Performance Computing, Multiscale computational modeling

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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