The goal of this project is to bring together expertise in geometrical modeling, numerical analysis, large scale computing, and scientific visualization applied to problems in medicine---computational interactively investigate bioelectric fields and provide the ability to design bioelectric devices. Every year, 500,000 people die suddenly due to abnormalities in their heart's electrical system (cardiac arrhythmias) and/or coronary artery disease. Traditional electrograms (ECGs) show damage that already has occurred in the heart; consequently physicians currently treat many life- threatening disorders of the heart's rhythm after they occur. This project seeks to equip physicians with a noninvasive and accurate means of determining the changes within the heart's electrical system that signal the onset of disease much earlier and allow them to treat the disease prior to significant damage to the heart. To accommodate efficient design and optimization, a computational steering package is developed which allows the user to design bioelectric devices and measure their effectiveness in an interactive graphical environment. Using interactive graphical input devices, engineers are able to design devices, place them directly into the computer model, and automatically change parameters and boundary conditions as well as the mesh discretization level needed for an accurate finite element solution. Instead of the typical simulation mode -- manually setting input parameters, computing results, storing data off to disk, visualizing the results via a separate visualization package, then starting again at the beginning -- software is developed to ``close the loop'' and allow the visualization to help guide (steer) the design and computation phases of the simulation. Not only are specific results on bioelectric field problems significant, but this general approach is applicable to many other engineering and scientific problems, and the computational infrastructure developed is broadly useful to many other researchers.
