Optimization in MATLAB for Cardiac Excitation Modeling towards FPGA Standalone Simulation Tools

Abstract

In past few decades, most of the modern electrophysiological concepts and methods were developed by the computational technique extensively to compute the cardiac action potential in nerve cells. Thus, tissue models consisting of a large number of single cell models cause a problem in the amount of computation required to obtain meaningful results from simulations. One of the solutions to this problem is by implementing the simulation through hardware modeling using a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). Here, a research on developing a real-time simulation tool responsible for reentrant excitations in a ring of cardiac tissue based on the FitzHugh-Nagumo (FHN) model has been carried out by using a Xilinx Virtex-6 XC6VLX240T ML605 development board FPGA. In order to invest some of the time savings for creating the FPGA prototype, rapid prototyping method introduced by MathWorks which are MATLAB Simulink and its HDL Coder toolbox have been used to automate the algorithm design process by converting Simulink blocks into Hardware Description Language (HDL) code for the FPGA using a fixed-point data type in discrete-time framework. In this paper, the method and the optimization of the HDL design through the MATLAB Simulink have been discussed and the FPGA hardware performance in terms of speed, area and power consumption has also been analyzed.