An electro-mechanical cardiac simulator based on cellular automata and mass-spring models

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 multiscale and multiphysics 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 propose a new user-friendly and efficient tool for the electro-mechanical simulation of the cardiac tissue that is based on cellular automata and mass-spring models. The proposed tool offers a user-friendly interface that allows one to interact with the simulation on-the-fly. In addition, the simulator is parallelized with CUDA and OpenMP to further speedup the execution time of the simulations. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.