Abstract: The heart is a biomechanical organ that produces a fluid mechanical output and is regulated by an electrical command and control system intrinsic to the heart itself. The subject of this talk is a computer model that will ultimately include all of these aspects of cardiac function. This heart model is based on the immersed boundary method, a computational scheme for the solution of the equations of fluid mechanics in the presence of immersed elastic boundaries. This scheme was orginally introduced to study the fluid mechanics of the heart valves, but it has turned out to be applicable to all aspects of cardiac function, including most recently the electrophysiology of the heart. Computational results will be shown as a series of movies (computer animations) depicting the predicted function of the heart based on the computer solution of the model equations.

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