3D heart modeling with cellular automata, mass-spring system and CUDA

Abstract

The mechanical behavior of the heart is guided by the propagation of an electrical wave, called action potential. Many diseases have multiple effects on both electrical and mechanical cardiac physiology. To support a better understanding of the multi-scale and multi-physics processes involved in physiological and pathological cardiac conditions, a lot of work has been done in developing computational tools to simulate the electro-mechanical behavior of the heart. In this work, we implemented an aplication to mimic the heart tissue behavior, based on cellular automaton, mass-spring system and parallel computing with CUDA. Our application performed 3D simulations in a very short time. In order to assess the simulation results, we compared them with another synthetic model based on well-known partial differential equations(PDE). Preliminary results suggest our application was able to reproduce the PDE results with much less computational effort. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.