Towards real-time simulation of cardiac electrophysiology in a human heart at high resolution

Abstract

We have developed the capability to rapidly simulate cardiac electrophysiological phenomena in a human heart discretised at a resolution comparable with the length of a cardiac myocyte. Previous scientific investigation has generally invoked simplified geometries or coarse-resolution hearts, with simulation duration limited to 10s of heartbeats. Using state-of-the-art high-performance computing techniques coupled with one of the most powerful computers available (the 20 PFlop/s IBM BlueGene/Q at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), high-resolution simulation of the human heart can now be carried out over 1200 times faster compared with published results in the field. We demonstrate the utility of this capability by simulating, for the first time, the formation of transmural re-entrant waves in a 3D human heart. Such wave patterns are thought to underlie Torsades de Pointes, an arrhythmia that indicates a high risk of sudden cardiac death. Our new simulation capability has the potential to impact a multitude of applications in medicine, pharmaceuticals and implantable devices.

Spatial Patterns of Excitation at Tissue and Whole Organ Level Due to Early Afterdepolarizations

“…In relation to the EAD dynamics, a heterogeneous human heart model was studied in Richards et al (2013), where the islands of M-cells were added based on sizes of Glukhov et al (2010). The authors modeled conditions of the LQT3 syndrome by enhancing the late Na + current.…”

“…(B) The corresponding ECG traces are shown for the Lead 1, with the time points marked that correspond to the image times in (A) . Figure reproduced from Richards et al (2013) with permission.…”

Integrated Heart—Coupling multiscale and multiphysics models for the simulation of the cardiac function

“…Several groups around the world [142,212,243,260] are using massively parallel computing and especially graphics processing units to speed up the computations in realistic heart geometries using highly-detailed physiological electrophysiology models, with the ultimate goal of providing near realtime simulations. Alternatively, other efforts point to reducing the complexity of the underlying cellular models [126].…”

Fast Acceleration of 2D Wave Propagation Simulations Using Modern Computational Accelerators

“…Mirin et al simulated thousands of heartbeats at a resolution of 0.1 mm using more than one million cores [8]. They were also able to simulate human heart function over 1200 times faster compared with any published results in the field [9]. Unlike prior work that focused on either using one programming language for parallelization on GPUs or multiple programming models targeting CPUs [7]–[12], we studied multiple parallelization approaches for running 2D cardiac wave propagation simulations.…”