On May 15, The Living Heart Project held the 3rd annual Members’ Meeting in Hyattsville, Maryland. Sixty attendees representing 32 unique organizations encompassing each of the Living Heart Project’s four stakeholder communities – research, industry, clinical and regulatory – participated. 
The event marked another step towards accomplishing the Living Heart Project vision of advancing the development of safe and effective cardiovascular products and treatments by uniting engineering, scientific and biomedical expertise to translate cutting edge science into improved patient care.
Jean Colombel, Vice President of Life Sciences for Dassault Systèmes, welcomed the attendees and began the meeting by emphasizing the strategic importance of the Project mission and the potential impact of the technology being developed on the entire cardiac healthcare community. He further explained the pivotal role that the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform can play in the delivering the translational technologies to the device Industry and medical practitioners for personalized and improved patient care.
Bram Zuckerman, Director of the Division of Cardiovascular Devices within the Center for Devices and Radiological Health at the FDA, and his colleagues spoke about his agency’s view on the role of modeling and simulation (m&s) in cardiovascular device development and the drive to increase the usage of m&s for virtual patients to reduce expensive animal and laboratory physical testing.
Partho Sengupta, MD, Director of the Cardiovascular Imaging and Professor of Medicine at West Virginia University, shared some insights from his recent TedMed talk providing his unique viewpoint on heart function from a clinical perspective, having spent many years analyzing state of the art imaging data. His views challenged several assumptions on which traditional cardiovascular modeling has been based which provided fuel to propel the Living Heart Project onto the next horizon of precision.
The meeting also featured a diverse set of presentations from many of the attendees on topics including patient specific modeling and 3D printing for clinical decision making, surgical simulators, model validation, virtual clinical trials, and blood flow, valve, and heart disease applications. 
Brian Baillargeon, Technical Lead for Dassault Systèmes’ Living Heart Model (Model), led a session highlighting the rapid technical m&s progress made thanks to the cross-disciplinary collaborations within the member community. He described implementation of new Model methods and technologies and fueled by and within the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform environment. He also hosted a Q&A session whereby attendees voiced their opinions on the project technological direction.
As with past annual meetings, this one featured quite a bit of networking time as this has proven to be where innovations and new connections are born. We’ve already seen new collaborations springing forth from the meeting!
In conjunction with the meeting, a full-day, hands-on technical workshop was held (that was filled to capacity) in which attendees were able to garner firsthand experience using the Model, and meet with Dassault Systèmes’ team of experts one-on-one to discuss m&s approaches for problems of particular interest to them.
With this meeting the Living Heart Project momentum continues to build now encompassing over 200 individuals from the industrial, research, regulatory, and clinical communities spanning the globe. With another release of the Model and its availability on the Dassault Systèmes Cloud, both planned for later this year, the expectation is that the pace will continue to accelerate.
