The 1st and 2nd International Conferences on Functional Imaging and Modelling of the Heart (FIMH) were held in Helsinki, Finland, in November 2001, and in Lyon, France, in June 2003. These meetings were born through a fruitful scientific collaboration between France and Finland that outreached to other groups and led to the start of this biennial event. The FIMH conference was the first attempt to agglutinate researchers from several complementary but often isolated fields: cardiac imaging, signal and image processing, applied mathematics and physics, biomedical engineering and computer science, cardiology, radiology, biology, and physiology. In the first two editions, the conference received an enthusiastic acceptance by experts of all these communities. FIMH was originally started as a European event and has increasingly attracted more and more people from the US and Asia.