A Parallel Multilevel Technique for Solving the Bidomain Equation on a Human Heart with Purkinje Fibers and a Torso Model

Abstract

In this paper, we present a multigrid method and its implementation on parallel computers to solve the bidomain equation that appears in excitation propagation analysis of the human heart with the torso. The bidomain equation is discretized with the finite element method on a composite mesh composed of a fine voxel mesh around the heart and a coarse voxel mesh covering the torso. The extracellular potential problem on the torso is formulated as a variational problem with a constraint at the interface of the fine and coarse meshes. We show that this formulation naturally satisfies the conservation property of the electric currents and fits into the multilevel adaptive solution technique framework. We also present our special treatment of the Purkinje fiber network in the multigrid algorithm where it is modeled as multiway branching lines connected to the nodes in the voxel mesh of the heart. A parallel implementation of the proposed multigrid algorithm on distributed memory computers is presented and its performance is evaluated using real-life applications.