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Cardiovascular diseases is a major cause of deaths in many developed countries. To treat cardiovascular diseases, minimally invasive cardiac intervention is widely used as an effective yet complicated solution. Training of cardiac intervention thus plays a crucial role. This paper addresses the use of Virtual Reality (VR) technology for the simulated training of cardiac intervention. In particular, the paper describes the architecture of a simulation system for virtual cardiac intervention. The framework proposed consists of hardware component, software component and methodology component. As an enabling technology, Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is applied in this work to enhance cardiac modeling, cardiac visualization, and cardiac interaction with the VR simulation environment

Much efforts have been made to develop realistic cardiac models for clinical and research purposes. However, to implement these models always needs to handle excessive computational loads due to the complex and dynamic natures of the heart given limited computational power of Central Processing Unit (CPU). In this paper, a real-time approach to cardiac modeling is proposed based on the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). A hardware platform is first designed and tested with a simplified model to represent the cardiac activities. Motion of mesh-based heart is then approximated to simulate the movement of each vertex. Time functions are used within the GPU platform to describe the cardiac cycle. The parallel computing feature of GPU platform significantly speeds up the computation process in real-time with over 140,000 vertices motion based on the time functions. The program is developed on top of CUDA architecture proposed and developed by nVIDIA. Computational Experiments show visualization of the cardiac dynamics is significantly benefiting from this new solution. Further improvement of the GPU based cardiac simulation is discussed.

Cardiovascular diseases account for a major cause of deaths in many developed countries. To treat cardiovascular diseases, cardiac minimally intervention is widely used as an effective yet complicated solution. Training of cardiac intervention is thus playing a crucial role. This paper addresses the use of Virtual Reality (VR) technology for the simulated training of cardiac intervention. In particular, the paper describes the architecture of a VR simulation system for cardiac intervention focusing on VR hardware, software and methodology is used in As an enabling technology, Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is applied in this work to enhance cardiac modeling, cardiac visualization, and cardiac interactive simulation with the VR simulation environment.