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Robin Choudhury, Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine, has written a book about the art and science of the heart. Here he answers some questions about the origins and highlights of the project.

The Beating Heart book coverPublished by Bloomsbury this month, The Beating Heart explores how the heart has been represented over time and across cultures.

In the video interview, Professor Choudhury refers to two aspects of the book that may be particularly interesting to Oxford audiences.

The first is a project he undertook in Oxford with colleagues to prove Leonardo Da Vinci's hypothesis about vortices of blood exiting the aortic valve. Read more about this 4D magnetic resonance imaging experiment in the European Journal of Cardiology.

The second is an interview he conducted with Professor Denis Noble about his work elucidating the pacemaker potential, which described how the heart can beat for itself. Professor Noble's work, which involved experimentation and modelling using the UCL Mercury computer, can be read in his single-author paper in Nature