This issue contains several invited papers, grouped in the first part of the issue, that report research on the application of computational techniques to medical challenges. The decision to focus on this theme was taken by ERCOFTAC’s Scientific Programme Committee, chaired by Professor B.J. Geurts, after a review of themes deemed worthy of preferential attention and exposure from within the wide range of subjects of interest to the ERCOFTAC community. It was motivated by the observation that CFD applications of this type, reported in a variety of other journals, are often less rigorous, specifically in respect of the numerical implementation, than those routinely published on engineering applications. The objective is, therefore, to send out the message that CFD for medical applications requires more careful attention to accuracy, numerical fidelity, convergence, grid-independence and boundary conditions to ensure that the statements derived from the computations are physically meaningful. We hope that the community interested in this theme will regard this focus as a positive contribution to the trust in computational predictions of medical flows.

Bernard Geurts

Michael Leschziner