Massively parallel electro-mechanical model of the heart

M. VAZQUEZ; R. ARIS; P. VILLAR; P. LAFORTUNE; G. HOUZEAUX; D. GIL; J. GARCIA-BARNES; M. BALLESTER RODEL; F. CARRERAS

Valencia

Conferencia; 9th International Simpsosium on Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomed- ical Engineering; 2010

This paper presents a patient-sensitive simulation strategy capable of using the most efficient way thehigh-performance computational resources. The proposed strategy directly involves three different players:Computational Mechanics Scientists (CMS), Image Processing Scientists and Cardiologists, each onemastering its own expertise area within the project. This paper describes the general integrative scheme butfocusing on the CMS side presents a massively parallel implementation of computational electrophysiologyapplied to cardiac tissue simulation. The paper covers different angles of the computational problem:equations, numerical issues, the algorithm and parallel implementation. The proposed methodology isillustrated with numerical simulations testing all the different possibilities, ranging from small domains upto very large ones. A key issue is the almost ideal scalability not only for large and complex problems butalso for medium-size meshes. The explicit formulation is particularly well suited for solving this highlytransient problems, with very short time-scale.