Zynq SoC based acceleration of the lattice Boltzmann method

Abstract

Cerebral aneurysm is a life-threatening condition. It is a weakness in a blood vessel that may enlarge and bleed into the surrounding area. In order to understand the surrounding environmental conditions during the interventions or surgical procedures, a simulation of blood flow in cerebral arteries is needed. One of the effective simulation approaches is to use the lattice Boltzmann (LB) method. Due to the computational complexity of the algorithm, the simulation is usually performed on high performance computers. In this paper, efficient hardware architectures of the LB method on a Zynq system-on-chip (SoC) are designed and implemented. The proposed architectures have first been simulated in Vivado HLS environment and later implemented on a ZedBoard using the software-defined SoC (SDSoC) development environment. In addition, a set of evaluations of different hardware architectures of the LB implementation is discussed in this paper. The experimental results show that the proposed implementation is able to accelerate the processing speed by a factor of 52 compared to a dual-core ARM processor-based software implementation. KEYWORDScerebral aneurysm, computational fluid dynamic, lattice Boltzmann, Zynq INTRODUCTIONSix million people in the United States have an unruptured brain aneurysm and about 30 000 people suffer a brain aneurysm rupture. 1 Among each 50 people, there is one patient with unruptured brain aneurysm and there is a brain aneurysm rupturing every 18 minutes. Statistics demonstrate as well that about 15% of patients with aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) die before arriving to the hospital and most of the deaths are due to rapid and massive brain injury from an initial bleeding. 2 A major solution to cerebral aneurysm is the clipping surgery, where a clip is placed across the neck of the aneurysm, preventing blood from leaking (as shown in Figure 1). However, in order to reduce the risk of having inaccurate blood flow measurements and efficiency of the clipping surgery, one of the solutions is to apply fluid dynamics to provide hemodynamic estimates for the simulation of blood flow in cerebral arteries. The impacts are severe since it targets one of the most critical organs in the human body, which is the brain, and any minor mistake could lead to fatal problems. Therefore, the required measurements (ie, velocity and blood pressure) for clipping surgery can be generated to provide the surgeons with the desired support to apply the clipping surgery. Sun et al present an analysis of the interactions of red and white blood cells into post-capillary venues by using a lattice Boltzmann (LB) approach. 3 A computational simulation for the separation of Red Blood Cells (RBCs) is suggested by Zai et al, 4 where the LB method is used to solve the Navier-Stokes equations. He et al 5 used LB for flow simulation in cerebral vasculature geometry along with the level-set method for medical imaging processing. Similarly, LB has been quite useful to simulate the blood flow in aneurysms. For example, the LB m...

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