G-Heart: A GPU-based System for Electrophysiological Simulation and Multi-modality Cardiac Visualization

Cardiac electrophysiological simulation and multi-modality visualization are computationally intensive and valuable in studying the structure, mechanism, and dynamics of heart. The existing multi-CPU based approaches can reduce the calculation time, but suffer from the hardware and communication cost problems and are inefficient for 3D data visualization. Compared with multi-CPU, the highly parallel and multi-core properties of GPU make it a suitable alternative for accelerating cardiac simulation and visualization. In this paper, we develop a G-Heart system where GPU-based acceleration technologies are adopted for both the simulation of cardiac electrophysiological activities and the online illustration 3D multi-modality (anatomical and electrophysiological) data. In the simulation stage, a phase-field method is employed to cope with the no-flux boundary condition. For heart geometrical structure illustration, a GPU-based ray-casting volume rendering algorithm is implemented and an improved context-preserving model with user interaction is integrated into the proposed framework. Finally, a fusion visualization method is proposed, which can provide 3D visualization results for both the simulation data and the anatomical data simultaneously.