Background

Organisers: Steven Niederer and Richard Clayton

Programmes with a focus on models of the heart have been held at the Isaac Newton Institute in 2001 and again in 2009. We are proposing to hold a new programme, centred on the need to bring uncertainty quantification techniques into models of cardiac physiology to enable parameter estimation, quantify sensitivity and provide guidance on model confidence. We feel this is critical for cardiac models to play a role in clinical applications, informing pharmacological studies and interpreting larger and noisier experimental data sets.

Our aim would be to bring expertise from the applied mathematics and statistics communities to bear on models of cardiac cells, tissue and the whole organ. We expect that this activity will involve both the application of existing approaches and the development of novel techniques to account for multi-scale and multi-physics models, complex geometries, dynamic boundary conditions, sparse and noisy data inherent to patient specific modelling. Nevertheless, introducing uncertainty in cardiac models requires an inter-disciplinary and collaborative approach, bringing together researchers with a range of expertise to create the new community that will have a lasting impact on the field of cardiac modelling. Many of the features of cardiac models are shared with models of other organ systems such as the musculoskeletal system, and so we would expect that the general advances in cardiac models accruing from this proposed programme would translate to other areas.

In the first instance, we held a scoping meeting that was attended by representatives from the clinical cardiology, cardiac modelling, applied mathematics and statistics communities. At this meeting we generated a ranked list of research topics / themes, refined the structure and length of the programme and produced a preliminary list of invitees.

Participation was by invitation only. If you would like more information please contact Steven Niederer or Richard Clayton.