You may have heard the phrase “my heart skipped a beat” when someone was talking about a romantic encounter. In truth, hearts that beat irregularly are dangerous for your health. Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common type of irregular heartbeat, and over time, it can worsen and become a permanent condition, a severe disorder that’s the leading preventable cause of ischemic stroke, according to the NIH. Nicolae Moise, a research scientist in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Ohio State University (OSU), is using ACCESS-allocated resources from NCSA as well as OSC high-performance computing resources to explore the long-term progression of AF, in the hopes that his research can help with treatments that can stop AF before it becomes a lifelong condition. His work was recently published in JACC: Clinical Electrophysiology.
AF is a type of irregular heartbeat in which the upper chambers of the heart – the atria – beat out of synch with the lower chambers. What starts as an occasional occurrence over time becomes permanent. Human studies are difficult to conduct with the level of detail needed to perform the types of tests Moise is simulating.
“We are using cardiac electrophysiology models to investigate how short-term cardiac activity (ms – s timescale) causes long-term changes in cardiac tissue (days – weeks – months),” said Moise. “Our simulations are, to my knowledge, the longest ones to date, simulating up to 24 hours of continuous 2D electrical activity.”
Simulations allow researchers to control every aspect of the heart over a long period of time. How a heart works may seem relatively simple on the surface, but there are a lot of calculations involved in running a simulation at this level of detail of a human heart. That’s where high-performance computing resources come into play. Moise used the U.S. National Science Foundation’s ACCESS program to get an allocation on NCSA’s Delta supercomputer to perform the complex heart simulations.
The ACCESS program opens up a wide variety of computational resources for no direct cost to researchers.
–Nicolae Moise, Ohio State University
“All 2D simulations were performed using CUDA code, on NCSA and Ohio Supercomputer Center GPUs – this was critical in order to investigate such long timescales,” said Moise.
“The NCSA resources we used were specifically NVIDIA GPUs available through Delta,” said Moise. “By performing the simulations using CUDA code run on NVIDIA GPUs, we were able to speed up our simulations by a factor of ~250. Since our longest simulations in this study take about one week to run, they would have taken on the order of years to be performed on a regular personal computer or laptop.”Moise’s work shows exactly why catching AF early and treating it is crucial for heart health. “Our research investigates the most common cardiac arrhythmia, atrial fibrillation, which is a significant cause of cerebral stroke, and thus morbidity and mortality, through computer simulations of the heart’s electrical activity,” said Moise. “This work allows us, for the first time, to track the initiation and long-term progression of this disease, which will ultimately lead to better drugs that prevent or halt its progression.”
To read more about this research, see the original story posted here: Protecting Your Beating Heart
Resource Provider Institution(s): National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
Resources Used: Delta
Affiliations: Ohio State University
Funding Agency: NSF
Grant or Allocation Number(s): MED230049
The science story featured here was enabled by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s ACCESS program, which is supported by National Science Foundation grants #2138259, #2138286, #2138307, #2137603, and #2138296.