Sherlock advancing biomechanical heart simulator technology: A 192 fold enhancement

Researchers from Stanford's School of Medicine, Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery recently published their results in The Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

They utilized the power of SRCC's Sherlock HPC cluster to massively accelerate their biomechanical simulation.  From the article:

"The Sherlock cluster represents a 192-fold computational enhancement over a standard computer (2 GHz, quad-core Intel i5) allowing us to iterate over 1.4 × 10¹⁰ unique positions and orientations using 384 computing cores."

"The complex motion of papillary muscles plays an important role in mitral valve kinematics. However, current ex vivo heart simulators—crucial tools used to optimize surgical techniques and devices—do not include this motion, thus presenting a significant limitation on the translatability of the surgical optimizations. Our novel six-axis image-guided papillary muscle robotic system incorporates the complex motion of the papillary muscles and represents a significant advancement in ex vivo simulation. The system can be integrated in all future heart simulator experimentation to more accurately replicate the in vivo environment, thus enabling reliable analysis and optimization of valve repair techniques"- Annabel Imbrie-Moore

We thank them for acknowledging Sherlock in their publication.  Hundreds of Stanford researchers have!

A video encapsulating the project