Design and evaluation of an inductive powering unit for implantable medical devices using GPU computing

Abstract

Nowadays inductive powering has become a widely spread technique in existing and emerging implanted medical devices (IMD). The geometry of coils couple plays a key role in the design, optimization and evaluation of a biomedical inductive powering unit (IPU). We have proposed a relatively fast method for an execution of these procedures, which is based on a mutual induction calculation using GPU parallel computing. Generally, our approach is to calculate mutual inductance as a function of uncontrolled (axial distance, lateral distance, inclination) and controlled (coils radii, turns numbers, distance between turns) geometric parameters of a coil couple. Calculated geometric functions in its turn are used in the design and optimization procedure to evaluate an IPU performance (e.g., load power). Achieved time gain of the GPU calculations in comparison with the host CPU computing is up to 80 for sequential summation and up to 8 for parallel computing. Also, it is shown that precision of our method is comparable to the precision of existing electromagnetic field solvers, and at the same time, computation time is substantially less (time gain is about 7 . . . 8 for 2D case and about 100 and higher for 3D case). Additionally, we have verified our method experimentally and shown that results of the calculations are accurate enough to predict real IPU performance. Finally, we have given an example of an IPU design optimization using geometric functions calculated with the help of the proposed method.