TorchCor is a high-performance simulator for cardiac electrophysiology (CEP) using the finite element method (FEM) on general-purpose GPUs. Built on top of PyTorch, TorchCor delivers substantial computational acceleration for large-scale CEP simulations, with seamless integration into modern deep learning workflows and efficient handling of complex mesh geometries.

TorchCor offers:

🚀 Fast, scalable CEP simulations on large and complex heart meshes
🔗 Seamless integration with PyTorch and scientific machine learning workflows
⚙️ Support for a wide range of ionic models and conductivity heterogeneity
🔧 Fully customizable model parameters for flexible experimentation and prototyping
🎯 Accurate simulation of cardiac electrical activity for research and development
📈 Generation of precise local activation and repolarization time maps
🩺 Simulation of clinically relevant 12-lead ECG signals through phie recovery (under testing)

🫀 Simulation Previews

Below are simulation results showcasing the electrical activation patterns over time in the left atrium and bi-ventricle.

<table> <tr> <td align="center"> <img src="docs/atrium.gif" alt="Left Atrium simulation" width="300"/><br/> <strong>3D left atrium surface mesh</strong> </td> <td align="center"> <img src="docs/biv.gif" alt="Bi-ventricle simulation" width="300"/><br/> <strong>3D bi-ventricle volume mesh</strong> </td> </tr> </table>

⚡ Performance

TorchCor is optimized for high-throughput cardiac electrophysiology simulations on large-scale meshes. The benchmarks below demonstrate its ability to efficiently scale with mesh size and leverage GPU acceleration over traditional CPU-based solvers. Performance tests were conducted using an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X 64-Core Processor and the following GPUs:

NVIDIA Tesla V100
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090
NVIDIA RTX A6000
NVIDIA A100 80GB PCIe
NVIDIA H100 80GB HBM3

<table> <tr> <td align="center"> <img src="docs/performance_cubic.png" alt="Performance on cubic meshes" width="400"/><br/> <em>Execution time on cubic 3D volume meshes with increasing node counts.</em> </td> <td align="center"> <img src="docs/performance_biv.png" alt="Performance on bi-ventricle mesh" width="400"/><br/> <em>Execution time on a bi-ventricle mesh (637,480 nodes) using various CPU cores and GPU devices.</em> </td> </tr> </table>

Unlike traditional CPU-based solvers like PETSc, which rely heavily on MPI-based parallelism and incur communication overhead, TorchCor minimizes latency by exploiting GPU-local memory and massive parallelism. This leads to superior scaling on large meshes, where CPU frameworks struggle with inter-process communication and abstraction overheads, allowing a high-throughput, low-latency pipeline well-suited for time-sensitive cardiac simulations.

🚀 Quickstart Example

Here’s a concise example to run a simulation using the TenTusscher-Panfilov ionic model on a bi-ventricle mesh.

🧩 Mesh file:
You can download the bi-ventricle mesh from the following link:
Google Drive – Bi-ventricle Mesh

The inputs are:

.pts file: coordinates of the vertices
.elem file: connectivities of the mesh
.lon file: fibre orientations
One or more .vtx files: pacing locations

Running the following code will produce:

a list of membrane potentials, each saved after every 1 ms of the simulation
a local activation time map and a repolarisation time map

all saved in .pt file format readable by torch.load.

import torchcor as tc
from torchcor.simulator import Monodomain
from torchcor.ionic import TenTusscherPanfilov
from pathlib import Path

# Specify the GPU device for running the simulation
tc.set_device("cuda:0")
dtype = tc.float64
# The total simulation duration (ms)
simulation_time = 500
dt = 0.01

home_dir = Path.home()
mesh_dir = home_dir / "Data/ventricle/Case_1"
# Load in the ionic model. Here we use TenTussherPanfilov for the simulation on bi-ventricle
im = TenTusscherPanfilov(cell_type="ENDO", dt=dt, dtype=dtype)
# 1. Initialise the Mondomain model
simulator = Monodomain(ionic_models=[im], T=simulation_time, dt=dt, dtype=dtype)
# 2. Load in the mesh files (.pts .elem .lon)
simulator.load_mesh(path=mesh_dir)
# 3. Specify the conductivity for each region
simulator.add_conductivity([34, 35], il=0.5272, it=0.2076, el=1.0732, et=0.4227)
simulator.add_conductivity([44, 45, 46], il=0.9074, it=0.3332, el=0.9074, et=0.3332)
# 4. Specify the locations where stimulation is applied
simulator.add_stimulus(mesh_dir / "LV_sf.vtx", start=0.0, duration=1.0, intensity=100)
simulator.add_stimulus(mesh_dir / "LV_pf.vtx", start=0.0, duration=1.0, intensity=100)
simulator.add_stimulus(mesh_dir / "LV_af.vtx", start=0.0, duration=1.0, intensity=100)
simulator.add_stimulus(mesh_dir / "RV_sf.vtx", start=5.0, duration=1.0, intensity=100)
simulator.add_stimulus(mesh_dir / "RV_mod.vtx", start=5.0, duration=1.0, intensity=100)

# 5. Start the simulation
snapshot_interval = 1
Vm = simulator.solve(a_tol=1e-5,              # absolute tolerance
                     r_tol=1e-5,              # relative tolerance
                     max_iter=100,            # maximum number of iterations for each CG calculation
                     snapshot_interval=snapshot_interval,     # save the soluation after every 1 ms
                     verbose=True,
                     result_path="./biventricle")  # the folder in which the results are saved

# POSTPROCESSING: 
ATs = simulator.compute_activation_map(Vm=Vm, 
                                       snapshot_interval=snapshot_interval, 
                                       threshold=0)
print("ATs: ", ATs.min().item(), ATs.cpu().max().item(), flush=True)
RTs = simulator.compute_repolarization_map(Vm=Vm, 
                                           snapshot_interval=snapshot_interval, 
                                           threshold=-70)
print("RTs: ", RTs.min().item(), RTs.cpu().max().item(), flush=True)

simulator.vm_to_vtk(Vm=Vm, step=10)

📦 Installation

pip install torchcor

Note: Requires PyTorch with CUDA support for GPU acceleration.

🐳 Docker Support

For a GPU-enabled Docker setup to run TorchCor without installing dependencies on your host system, please see the docker/ folder.

📖 Citation

If you use TorchCor in academic work, please consider citing:

@article{zhou2026torchcor,
  title={TorchCor: High-performance cardiac electrophysiology simulations with the finite element method on GPUs},
  author={Zhou, Bei and Balmus, Maximilian and Corrado, Cesare and Cicci, Ludovica and Qian, Shuang and Niederer, Steven A},
  journal={SoftwareX},
  volume={33},
  pages={102521},
  year={2026},
  publisher={Elsevier}
}

👩‍💻 Contributors

TorchCor is developed and maintained by Bei Zhou, Maximilian Balmus, Cesare Corrado, Shuang Qian, and Steven A. Niederer in the Cardiac Electro-Mechanics Research Group (CEMRG) at Imperial College London.

We welcome contributions from the community! Feel free to open issues or submit pull requests.

Torchcor

Install / Use

README