Living Heart Project: Using HPC in the Cloud to Save Lives

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In this video from the Stanford HPC Conference, Burak Yenier and Francisco Sahli  present: Living Heart Project ~ Using High Performance Computing in the Cloud to Save Lives.

“Cardiac arrhythmia can be a potentially lethal side effect of medications. During this condition, the electrical activity of the heart turns chaotic, decimating its pumping function, thus diminishing the circulation of blood through the body. Cardiac arrhythmia, if not treated with a defibrillator, can cause death within minutes.

Before a new drug reaches the market, pharmaceutical companies need to check for the risk of inducing arrhythmias. Currently, this process takes years and involves costly animal and human studies. In this project, the Living Matter Laboratory of Stanford University developed a new software tool enabling drug developers to quickly assess the viability of a new compound. This means better and safer drugs reaching the market to improve patients’ lives. During this session we will look at how High Performance Computing in the Cloud is being used to prevent severe side effects and save lives.”

(from left) Francisco Sahli and Burak Yenier

Burak Yenier is CEO of the UberCloud. He is a thought-leader and speaker about High Performance Computing, Cloud and Software Containers. Burak is an expert in large-scale, high availability systems and cloud. As an early SaaS proponent, Burak’s management experience spans software development and operations. His most recent role was as the Vice President of Operations of a Silicon Valley SaaS company in banking. Burak built the company’s cloud infrastructure and operations from scratch and for scale. He also managed all the data centers and the digital payment operations. Burak co-founded UberCloud in 2012. UberCloud has developed over 150 case-studies in engineering simulations. The company publishes award-winning blueprints and best practices in cloud and technical computing. Burak simplifies the lives of engineers with powerful, easy to use compute environments in the Cloud.

Francisco Sahli is a PhD Candidate at Stanford University. Francisco received his bachelor and master degree from the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile. During his master’s thesis he developed a semi-automatic method to estimate the load bearing capacity of vertebral bodies from CT images using finite elements. Currently, he is a PhD student in the Living Matter Lab of Prof. Ellen Kuhl at Stanford University. His research focuses on modeling the electrophysiology of the heart in organ-level simulations. In particular, he has developed a high resolution, multi-scale model to predict potential side effects of drugs in the heart.

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