Cardiac Physiome Society

The concept of a Physiome Project was first presented in a report from the Commission on Bioengineering in Physiology to the International Union of Physiological Sciences (IUPS) Council at the 32nd World Congress in Glasgow in 1993. The term physiome comes from “physio” (life) + “ome” (as a whole), and is intended to provide a quantitative description of physiological dynamics and functional behaviour of the intact organism.

An IUPS satellite workshop ‘On Designing the Physiome Project’, organized and chaired by Jim Bassingthwaighte, the Chair of the IUPS ‘Commission on Bioengineering in Physiology’, was held in Petrodvoretz, Russia, following the 33rd World Congress in St Petersburg in 1997. This Commission evolved to become the Physiome Commission of the IUPS in 2000, chaired by Peter Hunter and co-chaired by Aleksander Popel. Subsequent meetings have been held independently or as IUPS satellite in the UK, USA, Japan, New Zealand, and Korea, and now in Canada for the first time. In 1998 an Endotheliome Meeting was organized in February by Fumihiko Kajiya and Masami Goto, a Bioengineering Consortium meeting in February at NIH with AIMBE (American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering), a Microcirculatory Physiome workshop in April, a symposium by ISOTT ( Internat Soc Oxygen Transport to Tissue) in August, and a second Microcirculatory Physiome workshop in Paris with the European Society for Microcirculation. In 1999 a Physiome Symposium was part of the European Federation of Physiological Sciences meeting in Prague. The enthusiastic development continued with the support of the IUPS Commission: a synthesium on the Physiome Project was held at the 34th World Congress of IUPS in Christchurch, New Zealand, in August 2001 and the Physiome Project was designated by the IUPS executive as a major focus for IUPS during the next decade.

The mission of the Cardiac Physiome Society is to promote integrative multi-scale simulations and analyses of cardiac physiology in health and disease, spanning the full breadth of cardiac functions and all aspects and levels of biological organization from molecule to organ to the cardiovascular system. The aim is to encourage and facilitate international collaboration, cooperation, sharing, exchange, and interoperability in basic, translational and clinical research data, models and technology development by various means including the organization and participation in Cardiac Physiome Workshops.

This is the twentieth anniversary of the first workshop. The “Society” at this stage is an informal gathering, not a formally established Society. Its focus is on organizing workshops each year or so in order to facilitate the aims above. The membership is simply the participants in the workshops, those interested in quantitative analysis of the biology, metabolism, and functioning of the heart and circulation.