Parallel finite element electromagnetic field analysis using numerical human models in HPC

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This paper describes large-scale full-wave analyses of electromagnetic fields using numerical human body models. Recently, medical equipment using electromagnetic fields including hyperthermia is spreading. During treatment, it is effective to focus the electromagnetic field onto the lesions inside the human body. The purpose of this research is to accurately calculate the electromagnetic field inside the human body using a numerical electromagnetic analysis method. The numerical human body model database has been released free-of-charge for researchers by NICT. This database is constructed using voxels that have 2mm edge length. The numerical human model is multi-material including skin, blood vessels, bones, internal organs etc‥ The adult male model is named “TARO”, and has 44 million voxels. Over 200 million tetrahedral elements are generated from the voxel data. In general, numerical analysis using ordinary finite element codes is difficult to apply to such a numerical human model because of the very large size of the mesh. However, by using parallelization techniques based on the iterative domain decomposition method (IDDM) we were able to perform large-scale finite element full-wave analyses for electromagnetic fields. In this paper, we apply our parallel finite element code based on IDDM to the calculation of full-wave electromagnetic fields. We report analyses of the numerical human body models with more than 200 million complex DOF by using a High Performance Computing (HPC) environment. The electromagnetic field in the human body is analyzed by numerical human models. All computations are performed using 320-cores (20-nodes) of the Fujitsu FX100 supercomputer in Nagoya University. We analyzed frequencies of 1 (MHz), 8 (MHz), 70 (MHz) and 300 (MHz) using the full-wave electromagnetic field analysis based on the IDDM.