Step-by-Step Tutorial Makes Cardiopulmonary Modelling Accessible

A new tutorial published in Advances in Simulation offers a structured, five-step introduction to physiological modelling and simulation, using an established cardiopulmonary model as a worked example. The article, published on 26 August 2026 as an open access resource, is designed to guide students and researchers from the initial conception of a model through to the interpretation of its results.

Modelling and simulation of human cardiopulmonary physiology emerged as a research methodology more than half a century ago, comparable in standing to laboratory experiments and clinical studies. Despite this long history, the authors note that teaching fundamental physiological modelling to students, and applying these methods in research and simulation training, remain limited by the absence of a clear and accessible introductory resource.

The tutorial addresses this gap with a workflow covering five stages: defining model requirements, developing the conceptual model, formulating the mathematical equations, implementing and verifying the code, and validating the model. This sequence walks users through the full lifecycle of a computational physiology project rather than presenting isolated techniques.

The material is deliberately pitched at an accessible level. It assumes only secondary school-level knowledge of physiology, physics and mathematics, together with basic programming skills. The article is intended as an educational resource and does not introduce a new modelling framework, positioning it instead as a teaching tool built around an existing, established cardiopulmonary model.

A complete Python implementation used to generate the simulations presented in the tutorial is openly available on GitHub at https://github.com/CRPH-CPM/CPtutorial. Making the code openly available supports reproducibility, allowing readers to run, inspect and modify the simulations themselves as they work through each step of the workflow.

The framework described is open-source, modular and extensible. According to the abstract, these characteristics are intended to facilitate education and the development of reproducible and transferable computational physiological models, so that components built by one researcher or educator can be adapted and reused by others.

The anticipated audience spans two groups. Educators in medical sciences and biomedical engineering can integrate the tutorial into curricula, while researchers can adapt it for their own physiological modelling projects. Because the worked example concerns cardiopulmonary physiology, the material may be particularly relevant to those teaching or studying circulatory and respiratory system dynamics in a computational context.

The publication appears in Advances in Simulation, a Springer Nature journal, and is available under open access, meaning readers have full access to the article without a subscription. The article is shared early to provide faster access to peer-reviewed, accepted research; it is citable and carries a permanent DOI, and this version is subject to further edits before being replaced by the final Version of Record.

By lowering the entry barrier to physiological modelling, the tutorial aims to make a methodology with more than fifty years of history more widely usable in classrooms and research groups. Its combination of a stepwise workflow, modest prerequisite knowledge and openly available code offers a practical route for newcomers to move from model conception to verified, validated simulation results.

Subject of Research: A five-step educational tutorial for cardiopulmonary physiological modelling and simulation

Article Title: Fundamentals of modelling and simulation in physiology: a step-by-step cardiopulmonary model tutorial

Article References: van Loon, L. M., Zoodsma, R., Mulder, M. P., Koomen, E., Kappen, T., Donker, D. W., & Oppersma, E. (2026). Fundamentals of modelling and simulation in physiology: a step-by-step cardiopulmonary model tutorial. Advances in Simulation. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41077-026-00478-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s41077-026-00478-z

Keywords: physiology, modelling, simulation, cardiopulmonary model, tutorial, open access, Python, education, biomedical engineering, reproducibility, Fundamentals, step-by-step