Data-driven modeling of liver injury, inflammation, and fibrosis

The liver is an organ key to myriad metabolic and immune/inflammatory function. Thus, liver diseases have a tremendous impact on quality of life and can be lethal. Liver failure is a prototype of complex disease that has defied therapeutic modulation due to complex interactions among multiple cell types present in the liver, inflammation that occurs as a consequence of those interactions, and the systemic spillover of inflammatory mediators that can drive a process of multiple organ dysfunction. This chapter describes multiple computational modeling approaches aimed at gaining both basic and clinically actionable knowledge in the context of liver failure. While this chapter is focused on the liver, the methods and approaches are likely to be informative and useful to investigators in other fields as well.