Object-oriented modeling in the service of medicine

The models employed in all aspects of science and engineering have grown increasingly complex, in order to allow them to capture more and more details of the systems that they are representing. Unfortunately, the increased complexity makes these models more difficult to maintain and harder to understand. Especially in a domain, such as medicine, with domain experts, who possess rather limited mathematical skills in general, the complexity of advanced models has become problematic, as these experts no longer are capable of fully understanding and criticizing these models. The object-oriented modeling paradigm offers a means to increase the overall model complexity, thereby enhancing the realism of its simulations, without making these models more difficult to understand or maintain than the simple toy models of the past. In this paper, the approach is demonstrated by means of a fairly elaborate model of human hemodynamics.