--What Is BioQUEST?
--BioQUEST
|Collection
|-- Biometrics
|--Biota
|--Data Collection and
|Organization
|--Demography
|--Environmental Decision
|Making
|--Evolve
|--Genetics
|Construction Kit
|--Isolated Heart
|Laboratory
|--Modeling
|--Sequence It!
|
--Collection
|Candidates
--First Review
|Folder
--Extended Learning
|Resources
--Software Materials
--Support Materials

	Isolated Heart Laboratory (IHL)
	Nils S. Peterson (Washington State University), and Virginia Vaughan (BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium)
Screen Shots | System Requirements

The Isolated Heart Laboratory is a software simulation that will enable you to explore how the ventricle of the human heart performs as a blood pump and to characterize changes that alter its performance. Your research with IHL should be aimed at understanding the heart in the vertebrate cardiovascular system. Among the variety of questions that you can explore with the tools in the Isolated Heart Laboratory, consider the following:

• How does the anatomy of the heart relate to its ability to pump blood?
• What are the functions of the heart’s valves and what are the consequences of changes to the valves resulting from diseases?
• What measurements can be used to distinguish between the relative “health” of a variety of hearts?

Screen Shots

The Experiment Summary window after running one trial of an experiment.

Associated with each IHL experiment is an Experiment Summary window, shown below. Using the tools in this window you will set up the experiment parameters, runone or more experiment trials, and display the results. Once your experiment has been run, you can use the window’s tools to look at your data in different ways, take notes on your experiment, and export your notes or your data to other programs for further analysis.

The Input Parameter Editing window, showing some of the input parameters that can be customized using the problem editing utility in IHL.

IHL comes with several predefined problems designed to present a different aspect of cardiovascular physiology or to illustrate a particular problem. In addition it is possible to customize a problem to meet your specific needs. Using the problem editing utility you can change the characteristics of the model input parameters to simulate a particular model of the heart, create simple or complex problems by hiding/showing parameters, and customize the appearance of the data table and the Summary window.

System Requirements

Macintosh or Power Macintosh

• System 6.07 or later; System 7.1 or later for Power Macintosh.
• At least 800K of available RAM, more for complex simulations.

The Cardiac Dynamics Introduction HyperCard stacks, found in the Extended Learning Resources folder, can be used as an introduction to some of the principles of cardiac dynamics that you can then explore more fully using IHL.