Spatial visualization of the heart in case of ectopic beats and fibrillation

Abstract

This paper presents a dynamic heart model based on a parallelized space-time adaptive mesh refinement algorithm (AMRA). The spatial and temporal simulation method of the anisotropic excitable media has to achieve great performance in distributed processing environment. The accuracy and efficiency of the algorithm was tested for anisotropic and inhomogeneous 3D domains using ten Tusscher's and Nygen's cardiac cell models. During propagation of depolarization wave, the kinetic, compositional and rotational anisotrophy is included in the tissue, organ and torso model. The generated inverse ECG with conventional and parallelized algorithm has the same quality, but a speedup of factor 200 can be reached using AMRA modeling and single instruction multiple data (SIMD) programming of the video cards. These results suggest that a powerful personal computer will be able to perform a one-second long simulation of the spatial electrical dynamics of the heart in approximately five minutes. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.