Modeling and Simulation in Medicine and the Life Sciences (Texts in Applied Mathematics Book 10)

The samples use in the book to cover different topics like the cardiac system or the cell membrane potential in MATLAB are useful and well written. The book could be simplified in the way it is written to make it more accessible to students and non mathematicians. I liked the book in general since the samples were so complete.

This book is not very interesting unless you are a freshman math major who has a subtle interest in physiology. The book more or less is a set of derivations and cute math tricks despite the fact it was designed to teach concepts of physiological modeling. I had this book as the focus of a biomedical engineering graduate class, and it's not very useful for that. Probably 3/4 of the questions in the back of each chapter could be summarized as "plug (some value) into (some equation). What is the answer?" They do the thinking for you and then ask you to regurgitate a formula or plug and chug. It doesn't demand any understanding of the material to answer most of the questions. There is almost no design or medical treatment choices involved--you are just studying something for the sake of studying it. The math tricks and derivations are really the focus of the book, rather than the actual conservation principles or physiology concepts that the models are based on. Assumptions are explained, but often the alternatives or models actually used in the field are not discussed at all. Finally, the MATLAB code that is included is rather poor. None of the graphs have titles or labeled axes, so in order to run a simulation, you must first dig through the code for an hour to figure out what each of the plots is. They also use up to 8 or so different files for simulations, which is rather silly. Most of the stuff they're doing can be done cleanly in no more than 4 documents. There is very little commenting in the book code which makes it all the more time-consuming to follow.It might be a decent reference book for understanding some basic modeling principles, but that's about all.

Love the way this book is written. Easy to follow and understand. Nice explanations. Not exactly the kind of book I would see myself leisurely read, yet that's exactly what I was doing!

Excellent text on modeling physiological systems. It wastes few words. A knowledge of algebra and elementary calculus is necessary but not more. A working knowledge of physiology is helpful but also not necessary. I would highly recommend this book to anyone studying medical engineering.

This version of the book is good enough.Some of the words and letters are really hard to understand, especially the sub-print, so it can get frustrating when you need to study or do homework.Only buy if you need the book immediately.

Complicated descriptions of physiological and biological mathematical models. Too bland and no love put into the book, I wish they would give it a make over.

The following remark was submitted to Amazon as a comment on Overstreet's review. It did not give a rating of the book - the 5 star rating is Amazon's. The book is designed for undergraduate courses that introduce students to mathematical modeling of medical and life science systems. As stated in the Preface, students should have at least one term of calculus. While we have based graduate courses on topics presented in this book, they involve substantial supplemental materials.

First of all, there are so many typos in the book. As someone else has mentioned, the text layout is really bad and hard to follow, especially when you have to go for pages to find the figures that match the text you are reading.Seriously, this is not a great textbook. The wordings for many exercise problems are hella confusing (not even my instructor could understand them). The mathematical aspects in the modeling systems are poorly covered and not at all at depth. OOH, the biology in it is just so, so poorly explained. For students with a biology / life sciences background, a lot of if is not accurate and thus cannot serve the purpose of better understanding. It is like, the book tries to find a balance between a decent amount of math and a decent amount of biology to satisfy the learning goals of students with a spectrum of backgrounds, but fails miserably. Granted it is hard to write a textbook that serves different people well, but you can do better than this...I dont have recommendations for alternative textbooks, but some tips for traditional biology students who want to go into quantitative in college: do a math major, take all the analysis classes, take linear algebra, dont stop after calculus. College calc 1/2/3 teaches you the surface not the roots. Start early if you want to do quantitative.This textbook can only be a "fun" read.