For their project “Digital Twin Simulation of Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Progression and Drug Response (hp260302)” Abdallah Hasaballa, our project partner from University of Oxford, was awarded 1.45 million node hours on Fugako for one year, from 1 October 2026 to 30 September 2027. Fugaku is a supercomputer at the RIKEN centre for computational science in Kobe, Japan.
The Fugaku allocation will support the development and simulation of patient-specific cardiac digital twins for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). They will use cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging and 12-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) data from the SMASH-HCM cohort to reconstruct and personalise biventricular heart models, capturing both their electrical activity and mechanical function.
Using Fugaku, they will then run the computationally intensive electromechanical simulations needed to investigate how HCM progresses, how electrical and mechanical changes interact to affect heart function, and how selected therapies may modify these effects. The simulations will allow them to assess clinically relevant measures such as ECG features, pressure–volume function, ejection fraction, and myocardial strain.
The SMASH-HCM project provides the clinical data needed to build and personalise the digital twins, while Fugaku provides us with high-performance computing capacity that is required to run large-scale simulations. Ultimately, the aim is to gain mechanistic insight into the disease mechanisms driving HCM progression and to explore how these digital twins could support more personalised risk stratification and treatment evaluation.
The award was listed on the official HPCI FY2026 announcement, which you can find here https://lnkd.in/ezxEr6ss.
