GPU-Based Parallelization for Computer Simulation of Electrocardiogram

This paper presents a parallel algorithm using GPU for computer simulation of Electrocardiogram (ECG) based on a 3-dimensional (3D) whole-heart model. The computer heart model includes approximately 50,000 discrete elements (model cells) inside a torso model represented by 344 nodal points with 684 triangular meshes. After the excitation propagation is simulated in the heart model, the Poisson question is applied to the volume conductor for computing ECG, which involves a maximum of about 50,000 electric current dipole sources and four boundaries including the torso surface and three surfaces of heart model. The parallel algorithm was designed to solve this problem based on GPU. It accelerates the speed of calculation of ECG to 2.74 times with very low relative error compared with the serial algorithm. This study demonstrates a potential method using GPU for parallel computing in biomedical simulation study.