Parallel solution of cardiac reaction-diffusion models

Abstract

We present and study a parallel iterative solver for reaction-diffusion systems in three dimensions arising in computational electrocardiology, such as the Bidomain and Monodomain models. The models include intramural fiber rotation and anisotropic conductivity coefficients that can be fully orthotropic or axially symmetric around the fiber direction. These cardiac models are coupled with a membrane model for the ionic currents, consisting of a system of ordinary differential equations. The solver employs structured isoparametric Q1 finite elements in space and a semi-implicit adaptive method in time. Parallelization and portability are based on the PETSc parallel library and large-scale computations with up to O(107) unknowns have been run on parallel computers. These simulation of the full Bidomain model (without operator or variable splitting) for a full cardiac cycle are, to our knowledge, among the most complete in the available literature.