An Approach to the Anatomical Correlation of Species through the Foundational Model of Anatomy

The increasing need for extrapolating information from one species to another has been highlighted by contemporary research in bioinformatics, genomics, proteomics, and animal models of human disease, as well as other fields. We propose an approach to correlating the anatomy of Homo sapiens with selected species, using the Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA) as a framework, and graph matching as a method, for determining similarities and differences in the nodes and relationships (edges) defined by the attributed graph of the FMA. We illustrate our approach by comparing anatomical structures of mouse and human that present prototypical mapping problems.