Hardware implementation for cardiac electrical excitation and conduction using an FPGA

Contraction of the heart is controlled by electrical excitations of cardiac cell membranes. The electrical excitations of the cells and their propagation in the heart tissue provide a basis of the physiological function of the heart through the cardiac excitation-conduction mechanism. One way to understand normal and abnormal dynamics of the heart is to simulate a comprehensive mathematical model of the cardiac excitation in order to study underlying mechanisms of the heart electrical system. However, simulating the dynamics of large numbers of a cellular model to form a tissue model requires an immense amount of computational time. In order to reduce the computational time required for the simulation, a hardware implementation of cardiac electrical excitation-conduction analysis system has been developed based on FitzHugh-Nagumo (FHN) model for a mammalian cardiac ventricular cell. In this research, one dimensional (1D) ring-shaped cable model with 80 compartments of the cell model designed using MATLAB Simulink blocks is able to be converted into synthesizable VHSIC (Very High Speed Integrated Circuit) of Hardware Description Language (VHDL) code by using an FPGA-based rapid-prototyping approach of MATLAB HDL Coder in order to simulate an action potential signal and its conduction through a hardware-implemented Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). Then, the VHDL design is functionally verified on an FPGA Xilinx Virtex-6 board using MATLAB HDL Verifier through FPGA-in-the-Loop (FIL) simulation approach. Simulations of cardiac cellular processes and reentrant arrhythmia are successfully conducted on Xilinx Chipscope Pro. High accuracy results have been obtained from the FPGA-on-board simulation compared to a software-based computer simulation with Percentage Error (PE) of 1.28% and 1.56% in performing the simulations of reentrant initiation and annihilation, respectively. The simulations are also capable to run in real time.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

mphil

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

masters

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia

Year dc:date.issued

2017

Author dc:creator

• Adon, Nur Atiqah

• QP1-345 Physiology General

Language dc:language

en