GPU Accelerated Simulation of Cardiac Activities

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.