FPGA implementation for cardiac excitation-conduction simulation based on FitzHugh-Nagumo model

Abstract

The paper examines a method for development of a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGAs)-based implementation of hardware model for the electrical excitation-conduction in cardiac tissue based on FitzHugh-Nagumo (FHN) mathematical model towards real-time simulation. The FHN model is described by a set of nonlinear Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) that includes two dynamic state variables for describing the excitation and the recovery states of a cardiac cell and the model is able to reproduce many characteristics of electrical excitation in cardiac tissues. In this paper, one dimensional (1D) FHN cable model is designed using MATLAB Simulink in order to simulate the conduction of cardiac excitation in coupled nonlinear systems of the heart dynamics. The designed MATLAB Simulink model is then being used for Very High Speed Integrated Circuit (VHSIC) Hardware Description Language (VHDL) code generation by using HDL Coder that will be implemented on a hardware design FPGA platform of Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGA board. In order to verify and analyze the designed algorithm on the platform, HDL Verifier is used through co-simulation with FPGA-in-the-loop (FIL) simulation and it has shown a significant result which has increased confidence that the algorithm will work in the real FPGA stand-alone application. Therefore, these approaches provide an effective FPGA design flow towards a stand-alone implementation to perform real-time simulations of the cellular excitation-conduction in a large scale cell models.