Computational tools for modeling electrical activity in cardiac tissue

Computer models offer many attractive benefits. However, the modeling of cardiac tissue is computationally expensive due to several physical constraints which result in fine spatiotemporal discretization over large spatiotemporal regions. Our laboratory has been actively trying to develop new techniques to make large scale cardiac simulations tractable over the past 15 years. This paper describes the latest modeling software that our group has developed, called Carp (Cardiac arrhythmias research package). It is designed to run in both shared memory and clustered computing environments. Carp aims to be modular and flexible by following a plug-in framework. This allows the latest models and most efficient solvers to be incorporated as well as enabling run-time selection of techniques. Performance results are given for a large-scale simulation which utilized a comprehensive membrane ionic current description.