Patient-specific modelling of pulmonary airflow using GPU cluster for the application in medical practice

T. Miki, X. Wang, T. Aoki, Y. Imai, T. Ishikawa, K. Takase, T. Yamaguchi

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

22 Scopus citations

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel patient-specific method of modelling pulmonary airflow using graphics processing unit (GPU) computation that can be applied in medical practice. To overcome the barriers imposed by computation speed, installation price and footprint to the application of computational fluid dynamics, we focused on GPU computation and the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM). The GPU computation and LBM are compatible due to the characteristics of the GPU. As the optimisation of data access is essential for the performance of the GPU computation, we developed an adaptive meshing method, in which an airway model is covered by isotropic subdomains consisting of a uniform Cartesian mesh. We found that 4 3 size subdomains gave the best performance. The code was also tested on a small GPU cluster to confirm its performance and applicability, as the price and footprint are reasonable for medical applications.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)771-778
Number of pages8
JournalComputer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering
Volume15
Issue number7
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 2012
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • high-performance computing
  • lattice Boltzmann method
  • multi-GPU computation
  • patient-specific modelling
  • pulmonary airflow simulation

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