Progress with a Multiscale Systems Engineering Approach to Cardiac Development

Multiscale systems engineering provides a way to integrate models of real-world phenomena that allows a holistic understanding of component interactions at different levels of scale simultaneously. The discipline draws upon information engineering to provide ontological representations that are derived from digital libraries of terms, themselves found at distributed locations around the world. Cardiac development is well understood within discrete levels of analysis. The application of the multiscale framework gives added value by unlocking the relationships between genetic-based information at one level of analysis and the phenotype it encodes for at the cell and organ levels of abstraction. The multiscale-based relationships have begun to demonstrate new insights into normal cardiac development and conditions that give rise to congenital heart diseases such as the tetralogy of Fallot. This paper describes progress made in combining ontology-based information models and explains the importance of the role of multiscale systems engineering.