Visualization of Human-scale Blood Flow Simulation

Efforts from CompBioMed are directed towards creating a virtual human – a personalized digital representation of a human’s biophysical processes. Part of this is HemeLB, a highly scalable, 3D fluid dynamics code that is developing high-resolution simulations of blood flow throughout human-scale vasculature. Visualizing the results is a significant challenge, particularly due to the complexity and volume of the data. We use Intel OSPRay Studio for visualizing the resulting data directly on the production machine – LRZ’s supercomputer SuperMUC-NG - and producing outputs from 2D to Virtual Reality.

We have created a custom plugin to map the data to the highly memory-efficient VDB volumes of Intel Open VKL for delivering visualization at native resolution and interactive frame rates, eliminating data pre-processing.

In our exploratory video, we outline our approach that allows the full domain simulated by HemeLB to be visualized at a glance, a challenging task with existing techniques.

You can watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sd8_cujMP_4

The work has been accepted as a finalist in the SC21 Scientific Visualization Showcase.

J. W. S. McCullough and P. V. Coveney, "High fidelity physiological blood flow in patient-specific arteriovenous fistula for clinical applications", Sci. Rep., in press (2021) arXiv:abs/2012.04639