Over the past decades, researchers in computational modeling in conjunction with medical professionals started to develop and apply, in an increasingly frequent and intensive manner, tools based on computational models within different areas of medical practice. As a result, computational models have evolved significantly with respect to their capability to describe and predict the most important phenomena that govern the interaction between physiological systems of the human body, both in normal conditions and in situations altered by disease and/or human intervention (for example, surgery).

These facts, along with the staggering increase in the performance of computers and medical imaging techniques, have led to the emergence of a new paradigm in medicine: medicine, assisted by patient-specific computational modeling and numerical simulation. This paradigm shift represents the understanding of medical science as being built in a more rational and mechanistic way, based on a combination of clinical data, medical images and data obtained from systems or computational models capable of representing, with a high degree of precision, the phenomena underlying physiological systems of the human body.