An Electro-Mechanical Cardiac Simulator Based on Cellular Automata and Mass-Spring Models Ronan Mendon¸ca Amorim 2 , Ricardo Silva Campos 1 , Marcelo Lobosco 1 , Christian Jacob 2 , and Rodrigo Weber dos Santos 1 1 Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, Juiz de Fora - MG, Brazil 2 University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada rmamorim@ucalgary.ca, {ricardo,marcelo.lobosco}@ice.ufjf.br, cjacob@ucalgary.ca, rodrigo.weber@ufjf.edu.br http://www.fisiocomp.ufjf.br Abstract. The mechanical behavior of the heart is guided by the prop- agation of an electrical wave, called action potential. Many diseases have multiple effects on both electrical and mechanical cardiac physiology. To support a better understanding of the multiscale and multiphysics pro- cesses involved in physiological and pathological cardiac conditions, a lot of work has been done in developing computational tools to simulate the electro-mechanical behavior of the heart. In this work, we propose a new user-friendly and efficient tool for the electro-mechanical simulation of the cardiac tissue that is based on cellular automata and mass-spring models. The proposed tool offers a user-friendly interface that allows one to interact with the simulation on-the-fly. In addition, the simulator is parallelized with CUDA and OpenMP to further speedup the execution time of the simulations. Keywords: Cardiac modeling, Cellular automata, Parallel computing. 1 Introduction Cardiac diseases are a major cause of death in the world and a lot of work has been done to elucidate their causes. The heart pumps blood to the whole body and its contraction is preceded and triggered by a fast electrical wave, i.e. the propagation of the so called action potential (AP). Abnormal changes in the electrical properties of cardiac cells as well as in the structure of the heart tissue can lead to life-threatening arrhythmias and fibrillation. Mathematical models have been widely used to study the electrical activity in the heart. In the cell level, ordinary differential equations (ODEs) are generally used to describe the electrical and mechanical behaviour. Tissue simulation involves the simulation of thousands of cells, which make its numerical solution quite challenging. The electrical wave propagation is often modeled with partial differential equations (PDEs). Cardiac cells are connected to each other by gap junctions creating a channel between neighboring cells G.C. Sirakoulis and S. Bandini (Eds.): ACRI 2012, LNCS 7495, pp. 434–443, 2012. c  Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012