HEMELB Acceleration and Visualization for Cerebral Aneurysms
This work addresses the problem of slow aneurysm diagnosis for neurosurgeons by providing a faster tool, but it is incremental as it builds on an existing solver.
The authors tackled the need for fast and accurate diagnosis of cerebral aneurysms by developing an improved GPU implementation and visualization platform for the HemeLB fluid dynamics solver, achieving a maximum performance of 15,168,964 site updates per second to enable real-time simulation in hospitals.
A weakness in the wall of a cerebral artery causing a dilation or ballooning of the blood vessel is known as a cerebral aneurysm. Optimal treatment requires fast and accurate diagnosis of the aneurysm. HemeLB is a fluid dynamics solver for complex geometries developed to provide neurosurgeons with information related to the flow of blood in and around aneurysms. On a cost efficient platform, HemeLB could be employed in hospitals to provide surgeons with the simulation results in real-time. In this work, we developed an improved version of HemeLB for GPU implementation and result visualization. A visualization platform for smooth interaction with end users is also presented. Finally, a comprehensive evaluation of this implementation is reported. The results demonstrate that the proposed implementation achieves a maximum performance of 15,168,964 site updates per second, and is capable of speeding up HemeLB for deployment in hospitals and clinical investigations.