Extended ViZoo & ViP Hands Library

NEW FUNCTIONALIZED ANIMAL AND HUMAN ANATOMICAL MODELS

• Sim4Life V6.0 modelers can make full use of the newly released monkey model Miss Able V3.0 (detailed segmentation of more than 350 tissues) that is extending the ViZoo family and provides unprecedented details in the peripheral nervous system (PNS), including the cranial and intercostal nerves and all major nerves arising from the brachial, lumbar, and sacral plexus.
• The new monkey model is posable, i.e., the posture of arms, legs, head, mouth, spine and tail can be modified in Sim4Life’s Poser Tool.
• The model is uniquely detailed for animal experimental studies and, together with the human models, is expected to have a major influence on computational neuro-electrophysiology research.
  

Miss Able V3.0 in Sim4Life V6.0: the first female computational rhesus macaque monkey model with detailed nerve segmentation.

• In addition, Sim4Life V6.0 now provides a dedicated ViP Hands Library, consisting of 12 right hands and parts of the forearm.
• The parts are based on the human ViP models V3.x and are posable, i.e., the posture of the whole hand and of each finger can be modified in Sim4Life’s Poser Tool (pre-posed with the palm open wide and flat). All models are fully compatible with the IT’IS tissue properties database.

New dedicated ViP Hands Library, consisting of 12 right hands and parts of the forearm.

Always Up To Speed with the 5G Simulation Toolbox

mmWAVE COMPLIANCE ASSESSMENT: POWER DENSITY EVALUATORS

In Sim4Life V6.0, the power density (PD) evaluators were thoroughly revised and unified in a single powerful postprocessing algorithm:

Exposure assessment of a 5G device with Sim4Life V6.0 and DASY6 Module mmWave 2.2: Watch the movie here.

mmWave compliance assessment in Sim4Life V6.0: surface-averaged power density radiated by a mobile phone equipped with a 5G NR FR2 antenna array on the mmW-HEAD-P10 head phantom.

WPT Compliance Assessment

INTEROPERABILITY WITH DASY6/8 MODULE WPT & MAGPy

• Magnetic fields measured with the MAGPy probe using DASY6/8 Module WPT can now be imported into Sim4Life V6.0 and used to simulate the induced electric field and peak spatial specific absorption rate (SAR) inside a conductive phantom.
• The simulation and analysis process is entirely automated and follows a simple drag and drop of the measurement file, providing a concise summary of WPT exposure levels.
• All the simulation settings are readily available and can easily be changed to explore different scenarios and understand how they affect exposure levels.
• This seamless integration between measurement and simulation systems uses the best of both worlds, leveraging the shared software infrastructure.

Simulation of SAR inside ViP model Ella’s hand from currents induced by a Chi WPT coil, with magnetic field measurement seamlessly imported from the MAGPy probe using DASY6/8 Module WPT into Sim4Life V6.0.

Unstructured LF FEM Solver – Mesher Enhancements

OCTREE-BASED MESHER

• Our robust octree-based meshing solution now supports refinement regions, which define areas where a higher refinement is requested. To allow for a smooth user experience during large meshing tasks, we have moved the meshing process to a secondary thread.
• New Boolean operations have been added in Sim4Life V6.0. The “Merge” operation can be used to create a multimaterial 2D model from 2D outlines/covered regions. For use cases where, for example, electrodes must be meshed conformally to a tissue triangle mesh entity, a new Boolean imprint-like operation to create a patch on the target has been added.
• Based on the great feedback about our “Image Slice Meshing” tool, which generates adaptive triangle meshes from a 2D (slice of a 3D) segmentation, we decided to incorporate the same automatic sizing into the Local Surface Remeshing tool.

ANISOTROPIC MATERIAL MODELS

EM FDTD CUDA SOLVERS

• Sim4Life V6.0 provides anisotropic materials support for EM FDTD CUDA accelerated solvers. Relative permittivity and electric conductivity can be specified to be anisotropic and entered through the diagonal elements of the corresponding tensors.
• With anisotropic materials support for EM FDTD CUDA accelerated solvers, V6.0 supports users to make their applications catch any real-world scenarios.

EM LF FEM SOLVERS

• Sim4Life V6.0 adds an important set of tools to create anisotropic conductivity distributions that are particularly important in the low frequency regime, where the longitudinal conductivity can be up to ten times higher than the transversal conductivity (e.g., in neural tissues).
  This is essential, e.g., for neuro-related simulations where it is common to assign anisotropic conductivity values aligned to the spinal cord, spinal roots, or peripheral nerves.
  

LOSSES IN SURFACE IMPEDANCE BOUNDARY CONDITIONS

• Sim4Life V6.0 now provides support for inclusion of losses in Surface Impedance Boundary Conditions (SIBCs).
• The user is informed via a dedicated report of the power absorbed by the SIBC surface – and SIBC losses are now fully integrated into the computation of the overall power balance.

Productivity & Performance Tools

IMPROVED CUDA-BASED EM SOLVER PERFORMANCE

• All the FDTD-/CUDA-based EM solvers have been refactored and heavily optimized.
• Sim4Life V6.0 now supports to run your simulations on Volta and Turing GPU architectures (device code for V10.2 CUDA toolkit).
• V6.0 comes with a noticeable boost in computation performance for the CUDA-based solvers. In some cases, speedups of a factor of 2 can be achieved (improved memory access within CUDA kernel; tuning of integer precision).

API UPGRADE TO PYTHON 3

• The API of Sim4Life V6.0 now uses Python 3 by default. This makes it easier to install modern packages from the scientific computing community or to share scripts and modules between applications. The legacy Python 2.7 version of the API is still available for download upon request.
• It is now possible to use the entire Sim4Life API programmatically without starting the GUI. Users familiar with Jupyter notebooks, for example, are now able to create, run, and postprocess Sim4Life simulations without leaving the notebook.
• Thanks to a dedicated plugin, Python scripts for Sim4Life can now be written, executed, and debugged from Visual Studio Code, a popular and powerful integrated development environment (IDE). Developing modern programs that interface with Sim4Life is now easier than ever!
  

Parametric study of WPT exposure in Sim4Life V6.0 with hundreds of simulations performed and analyzed from a Jupyter notebook.

ANALYSIS & VISUALIZATION

• A new sleek option to slice a model from the slice field viewer has been added to V6.0. It generates a cross-section visualization of the (selected) model parts, either as outlines or filled areas, which overlay the field visualization. This new extension helps to communicate your insights to others by showing field distributions in relation to model regions.
• In Sim4Life V6.0, the analysis now supports importing 3D medical image formats, including Nifty, Analyze, UNC Metaheader, and other commonly used formats (e.g., also allowing the import of vector or tensor component images). This is useful for assigning patient-specific anisotropic conductivity distributions in the LF EM solvers, e.g., for the modeling of brain exposure and stimulation applications.