Released openCARP, an open cardiac electrophysiology simulator for in-silico experiments.
openCARP source code is public and the software is freely available for academic purposes. The simulator is easy to use and offers single cell as well as multiscale simulations from ion channel to organ level. Additionally, openCARP includes a wide variety of functions for pre- and post-processing of data as well as visualization. The python-based CARP utils framework enables the user to develop and share simulation pipelines, i.e. automating in-silico experiments including all modeling/simulation steps.
To ensure input compatibility with CARP/CARP entry allowing to reproduce a larger number of published studies, the user interface of openCARP has been designed to be backwards compatible, thus facilitating the re-use and replication of a large number of previous studies and carefully crafted in silico experiments.
The underlying code basis has been redeveloped from scratch. As this software is a community project, everybody is welcome to contribute. Its aim is to increase the productivity in the research field, so that researchers can invest their time in actually solving a scientific problem (rather than spending it developing yet another simulator).
With openCARP, you can import CellML-based EP models to avoid error-prone and time-demanding manual implementation. Additionally, it is possible to upload in silico experiments (based on CARP utils) of published studies to share it with your colleagues for a more transparent and better reproducible cardiac modeling research.
The implementation of openCARP builds on two decades of experience gained from the proprietary predecessors, the Cardiac Arrhythmia Research Package (CARP) developed by Ed Vigmond and Gernot Plank and acCELLerate developed by Gunnar Seemann and Axel Loewe. Both simulators have been used in 100+ scientific studies. Gunnar Seemann (Freiburg, Germany) and Axel Loewe (Karlsruhe, Germany) received funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG) to develop a sustainable cardiac simulator. They asked Ed Vigmond (Bordeaux, France) and Gernot Plank (Graz, Austria) to join forces which they agreed to in March 2018. Since then, we have been developing openCARP and will release the first version in March 2020. Beside the four group leaders, the core developer Aurel Neic joined the openCARP steering committee in November 2019.
Full information can be found here
