lifex-ep: a robust and efficient software for cardiac electrophysiology simulations

Area of Science:

• Computational biology
• Biophysics
• Medical imaging

Background:

• Cardiac function simulation requires complex multi-physics and multi-scale models.
• Existing software for cardiac simulations lacks comprehensiveness, user-friendliness, and maturity.
• High-performance computational tools are essential for accurate cardiac modeling.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce [Formula: see text]-ep, a publicly available software for cardiac electrophysiology simulations.
• To provide a user-friendly and high-performance computational tool for simulating normal and pathological cardiac conditions.
• To enable accurate in silico patient-specific simulations.

Main Methods:

• Utilizes the monodomain equation for cardiac electrical activity modeling.
• Incorporates phenomenological and second-generation ionic models.
• Employs the Finite Element method for discretization on tetrahedral or hexahedral meshes.
• Integrates myocardial fiber generation using Laplace-Dirichlet Rule-Based Methods or imported data.

Main Results:

• [Formula: see text]-ep demonstrates exceptional parallel speedup, scaling efficiently on thousands of cores.
• Software implementation verified against a benchmark problem in computational electrophysiology.
• Showcases capabilities through idealized and realistic simulations in normal and pathological scenarios.
• Features a user-friendly interface with self-documenting parameter files for simplified simulation setup.

Conclusions:

• [Formula: see text]-ep offers accessible cardiac electrophysiology simulations for a broad user community.
• Provides an integrated computational tool with accurate models and methods in a high-performance framework.
• [Formula: see text]-ep is a valuable tool for in silico patient-specific cardiac modeling.