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Center for Nonlinear Studies |
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide. While substantial progress has been made in understanding and managing these diseases, current strategies have not been sufficient to reverse increasing incidence and burden. A potential research solution is the cardiovascular digital twin, a virtual replica of the human circulatory system. However, a digital twin of the entire human vasculature has never been accomplished due to the large computational costs. The goal of this work was to determine the feasibility of a CVDT that includes modeling all vessels in the human body, including physiologically-relevant biophysical mechanisms. We used a fractal algorithm to generate all 34 billion blood vessels of the human body, and calculated the time-dependent blood flow using an integrated heart model. We included nitric-oxide-mediated vasodilation, as well as vessel deformation and rupture using peridynamics. To test the computational feasibility, we determined the complexity, parallel scalability, and the amount of resources required, including execution time, memory usage, and floating-point operations. We found the CVDT to be computationally feasible, with all simulations requiring fewer than 30 minutes of wall-clock time. With further computational optimizations and biophysical improvements, this model has potential to shift the change the paradigm of cardiovascular research and patient care.
Bio: Dr. Maxwell Cole recently earned his Ph.D. in physics from Louisiana State University, where he worked on developing the first digital twin of the entire human cardiovascular system. His research utilized high-performance computing to simulate biophysical processes at a systemic scale, aiming to create new computational tools that illuminate how diseases develop and localize in the body. Dr. Cole is now a medical physics resident at the University of California, San Diego, leveraging physics to advance patient care through improved prevention, diagnosis, and treatment.
Host: Patrick Diehl (CCS-7)