Developing Biomedical Simulations for Next-generation Healthcare

Supercomputers today are applied in ways that go beyond academic research and into diverse fields such as manufacturing and climate/meteorological predictions. Meanwhile, the use of information and communications technology (ICT) in medicine goes only as far as the latest medical equipment such as medical imaging diagnostic systems, or administrative support such as electronic medical record systems. Supercomputers, computer simulation in particular, have developed few practical applications in medical and surgical therapy and healthcare. We believe there is great potential for using computer simulations in this domain, and therefore we are pursuing research and development of several biomedical simulation systems. In this paper, we describe one of our projects, a biomedical simulation system using the heart simulator which has been under development since 2007 in joint collaboration with Specially Appointed Profs. Toshiaki Hisada and Seiryo Sugiura from the Graduate School of the University of Tokyo and their research team. We present an overview of the heart simulator, followed by descriptions of pre-processing and visualization in simulation with accounts of a case of application. Finally, we conclude with issues and future developments in order to realize practical application.