This was one of my first big projects during my work at the Virtual Reality Group RWTH-Aachen. The DeBakey ventricular assist device (VAD) is basically a blood pump which is implanted on a human heart and the big challenge for engineers is to provide a pump layout that does as little damage to the blood cells as possible, while still providing enough flow to assist the heart.
To improve the engineering workflow the Virtual Reality Group developed technologies to visualize the blood damage of cells flowing through the VAD. As the blood damage estimation is a complex calculation, the software was not able to allow interactive seeding of particles, i.e. placing new blood cells into the device while the application is running. This had to be defined beforehand followed by a few hours of pre-computation.
Interactive Particle Seeding
The goal of me and a dear colleague of mine was to prove that this can be done in real-time, using the vast computational power in modern graphics accelerators. For this we had to reduce the complexity of the blood damage estimation and implement all calculations using NVidia CUDA.
In the end we were able to trace 65.000 particles in real-time on a cheap low end graphics card, but there were strong numeric instabilities as we apparently went too far with the removal of complexity.
But we were very optimistic that by iteratively introducing more accurate algorithms, the visualization can be done in real-time. We still had very big performance reserves, first of all because our target device had only 1/25th of the peak performance of more modern GPUs and due to the strong parallelism more complex calculations have a very small impact on the rendering speed. This approach is still further investigated by other people at the VR Group.
GI Workshop VR/AR
We presented this technique on the GI Workshop VR/AR at the DLR in Braunschweig where we got great feedback from the German Virtual Reality Community.
Feel free to have a look at the paper: Interactive Particle Tracing with Cumulative Blood Damage Computation for Ventricular Assist Devices
I have also put a lot of effort into the design of a good presentation. Bullet point free presentations are still pretty uncommon in Germany but we got great feedback for this.