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Randles, Amanda

Publications and source records attributed to Randles, Amanda.

At least 37 records · Page 2

Investigating the Interaction Between Circulating Tumor Cells and Local Hydrodynamics via Experiment and Simulations

Introduction: The biological and mechanical properties of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in combination with the hemodynamics affect the preference of metastatic sites in the vasculature. Despite the extensive literature on the effects of biological properties on cell adhesion, the effects of hydrodynamic forces on primary attachment remains an active area of research. Here, using simulations in conjunction with experimentation, we provide new insight into the interplay of CTCs dynamics and local hydrodynamics. Methods: A flow experiment of CTC attachment was performed within a bioprinted, double branching endothelialized vessel. Simulations of fluid flow and CTC transport in the reconstructed and idealized bifurcated vessel were respectively performed by HARVEY, our in-house massively parallel computational fluid dynamics solver. HARVEY is based on the lattice Boltzmann and finite element methods to model the fluid and cells dynamics. The immersed boundary method is employed for resolving the fluid–structure interaction. Results: CTC attachment was quantified experimentally at all regions of the complex vessel. The results demonstrate a clear preference for CTCs to attach at the branch points. To elucidate the effect of the vessel topology on the location of attachment, a fluid-only simulation was performed assessing the differences in the hydrodynamics along the vessel. CTC transport in idealized bifurcated vessels was subsequently studied to examine the effects of cell deformability on the local hydrodynamics patterns and, thus, the preference of attachment sites. Conclusions: The current work provides evidence on the correlation of the hydrodynamics forces arising from the vessel topology and CTC properties on the attachment regions.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

Multi-GPU immersed boundary method hemodynamics simulations

Large-scale simulations of blood flow that resolve the 3D deformation of each comprising cell are increasingly popular owing to algorithmic developments in conjunction with advances in compute capability. Among different approaches for modeling cell-resolved hemodynamics, fluid structure interaction (FSI) algorithms based on the immersed boundary method are frequently employed for coupling separate solvers for the background fluid and the cells within one framework. GPUs can accelerate these simulations; however, both current pre-exascale and future exascale CPU-GPU heterogeneous systems face communication challenges critical to performance and scalability. In this paper, we describe, to our knowledge, the largest distributed GPU-accelerated FSI simulations of high hematocrit cell-resolved flows with over 17 million red blood cells. We compare scaling on a fat node system with six GPUs per node and on a system with a single GPU per node. Through comparison between the CPU- and GPU-based implementations, we identify the costs of data movement in multiscale multi-grid FSI simulations on heterogeneous systems and show it to be the greatest performance bottleneck on the GPU.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Accelerating massively parallel hemodynamic models of coarctation of the aorta using neural networks

Comorbidities such as anemia or hypertension and physiological factors related to exertion can influence a patient’s hemodynamics and increase the severity of many cardiovascular diseases. Observing and quantifying associations between these factors and hemodynamics can be difficult due to the multitude of co-existing conditions and blood flow parameters in real patient data. Machine learning-driven, physics-based simulations provide a means to understand how potentially correlated conditions may affect a particular patient. Here, we use a combination of machine learning and massively parallel computing to predict the effects of physiological factors on hemodynamics in patients with coarctation of the aorta. We first validated blood flow simulations against in vitro measurements in 3D-printed phantoms representing the patient’s vasculature. We then investigated the effects of varying the degree of stenosis, blood flow rate, and viscosity on two diagnostic metrics – pressure gradient across the stenosis (ΔP) and wall shear stress (WSS) - by performing the largest simulation study to date of coarctation of the aorta (over 70 million compute hours). Using machine learning models trained on data from the simulations and validated on two independent datasets, we developed a framework to identify the minimal training set required to build a predictive model on a per-patient basis. We then used this model to accurately predict ΔP (mean absolute error within 1.18 mmHg) and WSS (mean absolute error within 0.99 Pa) for patients with this disease.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Evaluating the Influence of Hemorheological Parameters on Circulating Tumor Cell Trajectory and Simulation Time

Extravasation of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) occurs primarily in the microvasculature, where flow and cell interactions significantly affect the blood rheology. Capturing cell trajectory at this scale requires the coupling of several interaction models, leading to increased computational cost that scales as more cells are added or the domain size is increased. In this work, we focus on micro-scale vessels and study the influence of certain hemorheological factors, including the presence of red blood cell aggregation, hematocrit level, microvessel size, and shear rate, on the trajectory of a circulating tumor cell. We determine which of the aforementioned factors significantly affect CTC motion and identify those which can potentially be disregarded, thus reducing simulation time. We measure the effect of these elements by studying the radial CTC movement and runtime at various combinations of these hemorheological parameters. To accurately capture blood flow dynamics and single cell movement, we perform high-fidelity hemodynamic simulations at a sub-micron resolution using our in-house fluid dynamics solver, HARVEY. We find that increasing hematocrit increases the likelihood of tumor cell margination, which is exacerbated by the presence of red blood cell aggregation. As microvessel diameter increases, there is no major CTC movement towards the wall; however, including aggregation causes the CTC to marginate quicker as the vessel size increases. Finally, as the shear rate is increased, the presence of aggregation has a diminished effect on tumor cell margination.

Roychowdhury, Sayan↗

Determining the impacts of venoarterial extracorporeal membrane oxygenation on cerebral oxygenation using a one-dimensional blood flow simulator

Venoarterial extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (VA-ECMO) is a mechanical system that provides rapid and short-term support for patients with cardiac failure. In many patients, pulmonary function is also impaired, resulting in poorly-oxygenated cardiac outflow competing against well-oxygenated VA-ECMO outflow, a condition known as North-South syndrome. North-South syndrome is a primary concern because of its potential to cause cerebral hypoxia, which has a critical influence on neurological complications often seen in this patient population. In order to reduce ischemic neurological complications, it is important to understand how clinical decisions regarding VA-ECMO parameters influence blood oxygenation. In our work, we studied the impacts of flow rate and cannulation site on oxygenation using a one-dimensional (1D) model to simulate blood flow. Our model was initially tested by comparing blood flow results to those observed from experimental work in VA-ECMO patients. The 1D model was combined with a two-phase flow model to simulate oxygenation. Additionally, the influence of various other clinician-tunable parameters on oxygenation in the common carotid arteries (CCAs) were tested, including, blood viscosity, cannula position within the insertion artery, heart rate, and systemic vascular resistance (SVR), as well as geometrical changes such as arterial radius and length. Our results indicated that blood oxygenation to the brain strongly depended on the cannula insertion site and the VA-ECMO flow rate with a weaker but potentially significant dependence on arterial radius. During femoral cannulation, VA-ECMO flow rates greater than ~4.9 L/min were needed to perfuse the CCAs. However, axillary and central cannulation began to perfuse the CCAs at significantly lower flow (~1 L/min). These results may help explain the incidence of cerebral hypoxia in this patient population and the common need to change cannulation strategies during treatment to address this clinical problem. While this work describes patient-averaged results, determining these relationships between VA-ECMO parameters and cerebral hypoxia is an important step towards future work to develop patient-specific models that clinicians can use to improve outcomes.

1D blood flow↗

Moment representation in the lattice Boltzmann method on massively parallel hardware

The widely-used lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) for computational fluid dynamics is highly scalable, but also significantly memory bandwidth-bound on current architectures. This paper presents a new regularized LBM implementation that reduces the memory footprint by only storing macroscopic, moment-based data. We show that the amount of data that must be stored in memory during a simulation is reduced by up to 47%. We also present a technique for cache-aware data re-utilization and show that optimizing cache utilization to limit data motion results in a similar improvement in time to solution. These new algorithms are implemented in the hemodynamics solver HARVEY and demonstrated using both idealized and realistic biological geometries. We develop a performance model for the moment representation algorithm and evaluate the performance on Summit.

Vardhan, Madhurima↗

Investigating the Role of VR in a Simulation-Based Medical Planning System for Coronary Interventions

Virtual reality (VR) based computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations are emerging as a viable solution to guide complex surgical or invasive procedures, such as percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), as they enable a realistic first-person experience of underlying patient anatomy and physiology. Realistic VR experience can be assessed by immersion, an objective VR property. However, it remains unclear how immersion influences virtual PCI procedures and what level of immersion is required. This study answers both these questions by evaluating the application of a CFD-based VR system and comparing semi-immersive and fully immersive VR displays. Nine patient-specific arterial models were simulated using CFD and used to conduct a quantitative user evaluation (n = 31) with both types of VR displays. The findings of this study reveal that VR immersion significantly improves the accuracy of simulated stent placement in complex arterial geometries, relative to traditional desktops with no immersion (p < 0.05). Higher accuracy is noted by the use of semi-immersive VR display, which offers higher display fidelity as compared to the fully immersive VR display (p < 0.05). Interestingly, CFD data mapped on to arterial geometries strongly influences the location of stent placement. This finding is demonstrated by the lack of significant accuracy deviation between the two immersive displays when CFD data is shown. This study provides compelling evidence that a CFD-based VR system rendered on semi-immersive displays can enable more accurate and efficient stent placement.

Vardhan, Madhurima↗

Low-Overhead In Situ Visualization Using Halo Replay

In situ visualization and analysis is of increasing importance as the compute and I/O gap further widens with the advance to exascale capable computing. Yet, in situ methods impose resource constraints leading to the difficult task of balancing simulation code performance and the quality of analysis. Applications with tightly-coupled in situ visualization often achieve performance through spatial and temporal downsampling, a tradeoff which risks not capturing transient phenomena at sufficient fidelity. Determining a priori visualization parameters such as sampling rate is difficult without time and resource intensive experimentation. We present a method for reducing resource contention between in situ visualization and stencil codes on heterogeneous systems. This method permits full resolution replay through recording halos and the communication-free reconstruction of interior values uncoupled from the main simulation. We apply this method in the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code HARVEY [1] on the Summit supercomputer. We demonstrate minimal-overhead, in situ visualization relative to simulation alone, and compare the Halo Replay performance to tightly-coupled in situ approaches.

Ames, Jeff↗

Multi-physics simulations of particle tracking in arterial geometries with a scalable moving window algorithm

In arterial systems, cancer cell trajectories determine metastatic cancer locations; similarly, particle trajectories determine drug delivery distribution. Predicting trajectories is challenging, as the dynamics are affected by local interactions with red blood cells, complex hemodynamic flow structure, and downstream factors such as stenoses or blockages. Direct simulation is not possible, as a single simulation of a large arterial domain with explicit red blood cells is currently intractable on even the largest supercomputers. To overcome this limitation, we present a multi-physics adaptive window algorithm, in which individual red blood cells are explicitly modeled in a small region of interest moving through a coupled arterial fluid domain. We describe the coupling between the window and fluid domains, including automatic insertion and deletion of explicit cells and dynamic tracking of cells of interest by the window. We show that this algorithm scales efficiently on heterogeneous architectures and enables us to perform large, highly-resolved particle-tracking simulations that would otherwise be intractable.

Herschlag, Gregory↗

Immersed Boundary Method Halo Exchange in a Hemodynamics Application

In recent years, highly parallelized simulations of blood flow resolving individual blood cells have been demonstrated. Simulating such dense suspensions of deformable particles in flow often involves a partitioned fluid-structure interaction (FSI) algorithm, with separate solvers for Eulerian fluid and Lagrangian cell grids, plus a solver - e.g., immersed boundary method - for their interaction. Managing data motion in parallel FSI implementations is increasingly important, particularly for inhomogeneous systems like vascular geometries. In this study, we evaluate the influence of Eulerian and Lagrangian halo exchanges on efficiency and scalability of a partitioned FSI algorithm for blood flow. We describe an MPI+OpenMP implementation of the immersed boundary method coupled with lattice Boltzmann and finite element methods. We consider how communication and recomputation costs influence the optimization of halo exchanges with respect to three factors: immersed boundary interaction distance, cell suspension density, and relative fluid/cell solver costs.

Gounley, John↗

Multivascular networks and functional intravascular topologies within biocompatible hydrogels

Solid organs transport fluids through distinct vascular networks that are biophysically and biochemically entangled, creating complex three-dimensional (3D) transport regimes that have remained difficult to produce and study. We establish intravascular and multivascular design freedoms with photopolymerizable hydrogels by using food dye additives as biocompatible yet potent photoabsorbers for projection stereolithography. We demonstrate monolithic transparent hydrogels, produced in minutes, comprising efficient intravascular 3D fluid mixers and functional bicuspid valves. We also elaborate entangled vascular networks from space-filling mathematical topologies and explore the oxygenation and flow of human red blood cells during tidal ventilation and distension of a proximate airway. Moreover, we deploy structured biodegradable hydrogel carriers in a rodent model of chronic liver injury to highlight the potential translational utility of this materials innovation.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Performance portability study for massively parallel computational fluid dynamics application on scalable heterogeneous architectures

Patient-specific hemodynamic simulations have the possibility to greatly improve both the diagnosis and treatment of a variety of vascular diseases. Portability will enable wider adoption of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) applications in the biomedical research community and targeting to platforms ideally suited to different vascular regions. Here, we introduce a case study in performance portability that assesses (1) the ease of porting an MPI application optimized for one specific architecture to new platforms using variants of hybrid MPI+X programming models; (2) performance portability seen when simulating blood flow in three different vascular regions on diverse heterogeneous architectures; (3) model-based performance prediction for future architectures; and (4) performance scaling of the hybrid MPI+X programming on parallel heterogeneous systems. We report on the lessons learned in porting HARVEY, a massively parallel CFD application, from traditional multicore CPUs to diverse heterogeneous architectures ranging from NVIDIA/AMD GPUs to Intel MICs and Altera FPGAs.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Computing the ankle-brachial index with parallel computational fluid dynamics

The ankle-brachial index (ABI), a ratio of arterial blood pressure in the ankles and upper arms, is used to diagnose and monitor circulatory conditions such as coarctation of the aorta and peripheral artery disease. Computational simulations of the ABI can potentially determine the parameters that produce an ABI indicative of ischemia or other abnormalities in blood flow. However, 0- and 1-D computational methods are limited in describing a 3-D patient-derived geometry. Thus, we present a massively parallel framework for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations in the full arterial system. Additionally, using the lattice Boltzmann method to solve the Navier–Stokes equations, we employ highly parallelized and scalable methods to generate the simulation domain and efficiently distribute the computational load among processors. For the first time, we compute an ABI with 3-D CFD. In this proof-of-concept study, we investigate the dependence of ABI on the presence of stenoses, or narrowed regions of the arteries, by directly modifying the arterial geometry. As a result, our framework enables the computation a hemodynamic factor characterizing flow at the scale of the full arterial system, in a manner that is extensible to patient-specific imaging data and holds potential for treatment planning.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

GPU Data Access on Complex Geometries for D3Q19 Lattice Boltzmann Method

GPU performance of the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) depends heavily on memory access patterns. When LBM is advanced with GPUs on complex computational domains, geometric data is typically accessed indirectly, and lattice data is typically accessed lexicographically in the Structure of Array (SoA) layout. Although there are a variety of existing access patterns beyond the typical choices, no study has yet examined the relative efficacy between them. Here, we compare a suite of memory access schemes via empirical testing and performance modeling. We find strong evidence that semi-direct addressing is the superior addressing scheme for the majority of cases examined: Semi-direct addressing increases computational speed and often reduces memory consumption. For lattice layout, we find that the Collected Structure of Arrays (CSoA) layout outperforms the SoA layout. When compared to state-of-the-art practices, our recommended addressing modifications lead to performance gains between 10-40% across different complex geometries, fluid volume fractions, and resolutions. The modifications also lead to a decrease in memory consumption by as much as 17%. Having discovered these improvements, we examine a highly resolved arterial geometry on a leadership class system. On this system we present the first near-optimal strong results for LBM with arterial geometries run on GPUs. We also demonstrate that the above recommendations remain valid for large scale, many device simulations, which leads to an increased computational speed and average memory usage reductions. To understand these observations, we employ performance modeling which reveals that semi-direct methods outperform indirect methods due to a reduced number of total loads/stores in memory, and that CSoA outperforms SoA and bundling due to improved caching behavior.

Herschlag, Gregory↗

Joint the Center for Applied Scientific Computing

The Center for Applied Scientific Computing serves as Livermore Lab’s window to the broader computer science, computational physics, applied mathematics, and data science research communities. In collaboration with academic, industrial, and other government laboratory partners, we conduct world-class scientific research and development on problems critical to national security. CASC applies the power of high-performance computing and the efficiency of modern computational methods to the realms of stockpile stewardship, cyber and energy security, and knowledge discovery for intelligence applications.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗