Microsoft Xbox 360 not only can stimulate your mind, but it also is now being used to investigate cardiac abnormalities.
Dr. Simon Scarle, a University of Warwick researcher, has detailed his work in using the Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) of an Xbox 360 to model and simulate cardiac arrhythmia in the hopes of understanding their initiation and propagation, so as to develop better treatments. While computer modeling has been around for decades, the breakthrough in this work is using a faster, cheaper, and commercially mass produced computer to accurately model the complex cardiac electrical system. Normally this type of modeling is constrained to supercomputers and must compete for computational time with a whole host of other important scientific modeling applications.
Scarle undertook this work while a software engineer at Microsoft’s Rare Studio and modified the GPU to display tracking data of how electrical signals in the heart move around damaged cardiac cells. This creates a visual model of tissue to allow clinicians to identify cardiac conditions such as arrhythmia.
“These game consoles aren’t just glorified toys. [They] are pieces of very powerful computing hardware,” Scarle says. “I can see this … being most useful for students and early-career scientists to just quickly and cheaply grab that extra bit of computing power they otherwise wouldn’t be able to get.”
Scarle developed this project as a fusion of his background as a software engineer in gaming and his past experiences with performing electrocardio-dynamics research at the University of Sheffield. He says that the idea for this heart-modeling project came from a “little shooter game” he developed while at Microsoft in which the player would gun down enemies in an arena that resembled a heart.
Now, if you will excuse us, we will be getting back to our ground breaking cancer research by playing HALO…
University of Warwick press release: Researchers using parallel processing computing could save thousands by using an Xbox…
Time : How Xbox Can Help Fight Heart Disease…
Microsoft Research : Implications of the Turing Completeness of Reaction-Diffusion Models, informed by GPGPU simulations on an XBox 360: Cardiac Arrhythmias, Re-entry and the Halting Problem…
Flashback : Dr. Halo: XBox Based “Care Consoles” to Invade Hospitals