GPU acceleration of optical mapping algorithm for cardiac electrophysiology

Optical mapping is an increasingly popular tool for experimentally analyzing the electrical activity in the heart. The optical mapping algorithm is computationally intense and consumes a considerable amount of time even with a highly optimized program running on a state-of-the-art multi-core microprocessor. For example, one second of data requires approximately 5 minutes of computation time (3.66 FPS) with a C++ program parallelized by OpenMP running on a 3.4GHz Quad-Core CPU. This article presents a GPU implementation of the optical mapping algorithm. Our result indicates that the GPU implementation is capable of processing the optical mapping video at 578 FPS which achieves 157.92X speed against the OpenMP optimized CPU implementation.