FPGA-in-the-loop co-simulation of reentrant arrhythmia mechanism in one dimensional (1D) ring-shaped based on FitzHugh-Nagumo model

Abstract

This paper presents the simulation of reentrant excitation-conduction of cardiac cells realized by coupling 80 active circuits in one dimensional (1D) ring-shaped based on FitzHugh-Nagumo (FHN) model. 1D ring-shaped cable model is designed using Simulink in order to simulate an action potential signal and its conduction for a hardware design by using HDL Coder to automate the model for Very High Speed Integrated Circuit (VHSIC) Hardware Description Language (VHDL) code generation. Then, the VHDL design is functionally verified on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) Xilinx Virtex-6 board using HDL Verifier proving the model through FPGA-in-the-Loop (FIL) co-simulation approach. It can then be downloaded into a target FPGA device for real-time simulations. This novel approach of prototyping cardiac reentrant excitation-conduction provides a fast and effective FPGA-based hardware implementation flow towards a stand-alone implementation to perform complex real-time simulations compared with manual HDL designs.