Aims and scope

The conference will focus on consideration of the rapidly evolving methods available for the measurement, imaging, and analysis of oscillatory biological signals, together with rich and useful discussions of their cellular, cardiovascular and neurophysiological origins and nature.

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Heart rate variability, the beat-to-beat fluctuations in heart rate, has been recognised for more than 3 centuries, with notable contributions coming from Stephen Hales (1733), Carl Ludwig (1847), and many others. But the origins of these fluctuations are still disputed.

Although we now understand the basic functional principles of a living cell, this is far from true of the associated oscillations and other fluctuations. For example, calcium dynamics and ATP dynamics, associated respectively with information processing and the energy currency of living systems, are still not properly understood.

For this conference we note:

1. That animals, including humans, can live for as long as their hearts continue to pump. We seek to understand the underlying principles of this function, focusing in particular on the variability in time, on all scales, from a single molecule in the beating heart to the entire cardiovascular system.


2. That life involves complex systems and needs sophisticated means to sense and process information. So the brain, as the central processing unit, processes information in a rhythmical way.


3. That today's technologies enable functional imaging of most of the processes involved in information and energy exchange within a living system. We aim to discuss these processes, on all length scales, from the cellular, through organs, up to the systems' level.


4. That advances in time series analysis have progressed to the extent that we can now extract the nonlinear dynamics of coupled oscillatory systems. We can also measure the associated changes of entropy, assuming that entropy and information can be linked directly at all levels of organisation. We expect to discuss many recent and current methods for the time series analysis of signals emanating from stochastic and/or coupled nonlinear dynamical systems.


5. That there is a corresponding need to understand the underlying physiological regulatory processes of biological oscillations, on all scales. We also seek to exploit this new knowledge to quantify states like anaesthesia and exercise, or to diagnose and treat diseases including the many that involve cardiovascular or neurological dysfunction.





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So we expect a lively meeting that moves forward rapidly on all fronts associated with the measurement and analysis of biological oscillations.