Computing power key to modeling human heart

With the help of one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, Kwong Ng, professor of electrical and computer engineering, hopes to build the world’s largest computer model of the human heart. The heart model is central to Ng’s quest to improve the use of defibrillation to save the lives of heart patients.

“The model is important in helping us to discover ways to optimize the delivery of the defibrillation pulse and predict the outcome,” said Ng, who has focused on this research since the early 1990s through multiple grants from the National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association. “To do this, we need to mimic the heart as closely as possible—and we’re getting closer every day—but the human body is a very complex biological system and we need computational power to provide more realistic details.”

Ng was using a smaller version of the state of New Mexico’s supercomputer, touted as the seventh most powerful in the world. The supercomputer became available to Ng and other researchers at the end of 2008. It is capable of performing 172 trillion calculations per second. The added computing power may enable Ng to create a computerized mathematical simulation of the heart that incorporates significantly more details. He hopes to build a model that contains several billions of elements in one to two years.

“It’s especially important for defibrillators implanted into the body that they cause minimum tissue damage and use as little power as possible,” he said.

Implantable defibrillators are small battery-powered devices that generate electrical shocks and are implanted into the chests of patients who are at risk of sudden cardiac death. The device is programmed to detect irregularities in the heart rhythm and deliver a corrective jolt of electricity.

The electrical events associated with fibrillation itself are still not fully understood. Another of Ng’s goals is to figure out the underlying mechanisms and come up with better ways to detect the onset of a heart attack. This will help design better defibrillators.