Starling Lab

Starling is an interactive, real-time simulator of the human circulation, for students, teachers and anyone who would rather watch cardiovascular physiology behave than read about it. Turn the physiological knobs — blood volume, heart rate, contractility, vessel tone, the microcirculation of a single organ — and watch what the circulation produces: cardiac output, arterial pressure, an ECG strip, and pressure waveforms from the left ventricle down to the capillaries and back up the veins. A REAL MODEL, NOT AN ANIMATION Nothing on screen is scripted. Sixteen elastic compartments — four cardiac chambers, the aorta, seven systemic organ beds, the venous reservoir and the pulmonary loop — are joined by resistances and solved 2,000 times per simulated second with a 4th-order Runge–Kutta integrator. Every pressure and flow emerges from three laws the real circulation obeys: pressure–volume…