Cardiac Physiome Project

Predicting physiological behaviour from experimental data combined with environmental influences is a compelling, but unfulfilled, goal of post-genomic biology. This undeniably ambitious goal is the aim of the Physiome Project and its subset the Cardiome Project which is an international effort to build a biophysically based multi-scale mathematical model of the heart. To achieve this goal requires further development of the current generation of advanced cardiac models which span an already diverse set of mathematical representations from stochastic sub-cellular regulation models to whole-organ-based sets of coupled partial differential equations. The focus of this programme will be on the development and application of the mathematical techniques which underpin the ongoing extension of this approach, and specifically to:

• integrate data from disparate sources into a common quantitative framework;
• examine the complex cause and effect relationships which exist across many temporal and spatial orders of magnitude in physiology;
• determine the appropriate level of detail to capture observable phenomena and the closely related issue of parameter identifiability;
• examine issues of model inheritance and multi-scale coupling for combining existing models together to create extended frameworks;
• define standards for the constituent electrical, mechanical and vascular classes of cardiac models.

Read more at: www.newton.ac.uk/programmes/CPP/