A GPU-based heart simulator with mass-spring systems and cellular automaton

Abstract

This work proposes an electro-mechanical simulator of the cardiac tissue, so that its main feature is the low computational cost. This is necessary to run real-time simulations and on the fly applications. In order to achieve this, we used cellular automata and mass-spring systems to model the cardiac behavior, and furthermore parallelize the code to run in graphics processing unit (GPU) with compute unified device architecture. Sequentially, our simulator was quite faster than traditional partial differential equations simulators. In addition, we performed different load tests to evaluate our code behavior in GPUs, and spotted its potentials and bottlenecks.