High Performance Adaptive Physics Refinement to Enable Large-Scale Tracking of Cancer Cell Trajectory
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Updated: Jul 9, 2026

Dynamic Lung Tumor Tracking for Stereotactic Ablative Body Radiation Therapy
Published on: June 7, 2015
Daniel F Puleri1, Sayan Roychowdhury1, Peter Balogh2
1Department of Biomedical Engineering, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA.
Abstract:
The ability to track simulated cancer cells through the circulatory system, important for developing a mechanistic understanding of metastatic spread, pushes the limits of today's supercomputers by requiring the simulation of large fluid volumes at cellular-scale resolution. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a new adaptive physics refinement (APR) method that captures cellular-scale interaction across large domains and leverages a hybrid CPU-GPU approach to maximize performance. Through algorithmic advances that integrate multi-physics and multi-resolution models, we establish a finely resolved window with explicitly modeled cells coupled to a coarsely resolved bulk fluid domain. In this work we present multiple validations of the APR framework by comparing against fully resolved fluid-structure interaction methods and employ techniques, such as latency hiding and maximizing memory bandwidth, to effectively utilize heterogeneous node architectures. Collectively, these computational developments and performance optimizations provide a robust and scalable framework to enable system-level simulations of cancer cell transport.
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