https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190329151547.htm

Heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide, and cardiac dynamics modeling can be useful in the study and treatment of heart problems like arrhythmias. However, due to the complex electrophysiology of heart cells and tissue, modeling conditions like arrhythmias requires solving billions of differential equations and previously has been limited to only those with access to supercomputers.

"This opens up a lot of new research opportunities, including for RIT undergraduates," said Elizabeth Cherry, associate professor and director of RIT's mathematical modeling program and co-author of a new Science Advances article that introduces the new methodology. "I felt really restricted in what I could ask undergraduates to do in Research Experiences for Undergraduates programs or even our full-time students because the previous supercomputer simulations took so long. But now they can work with these complex models in real-time so it opens up a whole new world of opportunities to what they can study."