Name: Thushka Maharaj
Institution: University of Oxford
Research: The effects of defibrillation on the heart
Thushka Maharaj is a DPhil Student within the Computational Biology Group at the University of Oxford. She is part of an international collaboration studying the effects of applying an electrical shock to both healthy and diseased hearts, in an attempt to understand exactly how defibrillation works.
Within a normal, healthy heart the muscle cells (myocardial cells) produce regular, powerful cardiac contractions that allow the heart to pump blood around the body. During fibrillation, these contractions are no longer regular and powerful, but irregular so the heart is unable to pump blood around the body. The standard method today of treating hearts in fibrillation is to shock the heart into stopping completely – defibrillation – so that the myocardial cells have the chance to get back into a regular rhythm again.
Whilst this technique has been used successfully for many years, the mechanisms behind it are still not fully understood. Along with colleagues in the Integrative Biology project, Thushka hopes to address some of the questions still being asked. In order to do so, she simulates how the application of electric shocks and differing types of tissue properties affects the behaviour of a normal, healthy heart.
“We use parallel code with around a million nodes, so it is pretty computationally intensive,” explains Thushka. “But we can get 20ms of animation in 20 minutes using 32 CPUs on the NGS, which is a huge improvement.”
So much so in fact that she feels without the NGS, she would not have been able to even attempt her doctorate research. “I didn’t even know the NGS existed before starting my doctorate, but I don’t think we could have run these simulations without using the NGS. And the benefits of services such as the Storage Resource Broker are immense - it’s fantastic to be able to share data with colleagues all over the world so easily.”
This project was partly funded by EPSRC.
A tutorial is available on the use of the NGS-SRB.
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