Acceleration of Radiofrequency Ablation Process for Liver Cancer Using GPU

Computational simulation is a technique used in several research areas. In medicine, the Radiofrequency Ablation Finite Element Method (RAFEM) application was developed to simulate the RadioFrequency Ablation (RFA) process, which is a medical procedure to treat hepatic cancer. This application presents a high computational time to perform a simulation, taking up to 20 hours for simulation while the RFA procedure itself lasts from four to six minutes. Some efforts have already been carried out to obtain better performance for the application. However, none of them considered the use of GPUs, which is an architecture that can be used to accelerate finite element method applications. This work aims to propose a parallelization approach to explore ways to obtain better performance for the application through the use of GPUs to reduce the execution time under a few minutes. We adopted an iterative development process to coordinate and to generate parallel versions of the code. Through this process allied to the use of GPU-accelerated code libraries, it was possible to create different versions of the application, adding improvements to each one. The results obtained with the best version showed a reduction of the computation time by up to 18 times. Therefore, this improvement makes the use of RAFEM application more feasible in health treatment by reducing the waiting time for the results.