Functional imaging and modeling of the heart

The1stand2ndInternationalConferencesonFunctionalImagingandModelling of the Heart (FIMH) were held in Helsinki, Finland, in November 2001, and in Lyon, France, in June 2003. These meetings were born through a fruitful sci- ti? c collaboration between France and Finland that outreached to other groups and led to the start of this biennial event. The FIMH conference was the ? rst attempt to agglutinate researchers from several complementary but often i- lated ? elds: cardiac imaging, signal and image processing, applied mathematics and physics, biomedical engineering and computer science, cardiology, radi- ogy, biology, and physiology. In the ? rst two editions, the conference received an enthusiastic acceptance by experts of all these communities. FIMH was ori- nally started as a European event and has increasingly attracted more and more people from the US and Asia. This edition of FIMH received the largest number of submissions so far with a result of 47 papers being accepted as either oral presentations or posters. There were a number of submissions from non-EU institutions which con? rms the growing interest in this series of meetings. All papers were reviewed by up to four reviewers. The accepted contributions were organized into 8 oral sessions and 3 poster sessions complemented by a number of invited talks. This year we tried to allocate as many papers as possible as oral presentations to facilitate more active participation and to stimulate multidisciplinary discussions.