What is openCARP?
openCARP is an open cardiac electrophysiology simulator for in-silico experiments. Its source code is public and the software is freely available for academic purposes. openCARP 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 CARPutils framework enables the user to develop and share simulation pipelines, i.e. automating in-silico experiments including all modeling/simulation steps.
Search the openCARP web page and documentation:
Getting started
New to cardiac electrophysiological modeling or openCARP? This is the place to go first!
About
General information about the software as well as the people and processes behind openCARP
Download
Find the software, installation guides and the license here as well as the proper work to cite when you use openCARP results in a publication
Documentation
Need an openCARP introduction, training or documentation? Find it here along with our question & answer system
Community
Everything you need to interact with the openCARP community
News
Contributor Meeting
We invite you to the 1st openCARP Contributor Meeting (March 14, 2022, 4-7pm CET, online) for information on how to contribute to both sharing numerical experiments with the openCARP community and the development of the underlying software framework (the openCARP simulator and carputils as scripting...
Changes to model names
A new year is approaching and with it also changes are coming to openCARP. Besides the
- New naming scheme for the ionic models (Non backwards-compatible change planned for February 2022. Read below for information on how to update your experiments.)
this news post also covers
- Further new fea...
openCARP paper published
The paper "The openCARP simulation environment for cardiac electrophysiology" recently published in Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine gives a comprehensive overview of the openCARP simulation environment. Check it out here and cite if you use openCARP!
Newsletter
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User Meeting
The 4th openCARP workshop will take on the 20-22 of September this year in Karlsruhe, Germany. Registration is now open until September 8. Further information about openCARP workshops can be found in the section openCARP user meeting. Stay informed and subsribe to our newsletter!
Quick facts
To ensure input compatibility with CARP/CARPentry 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, you are welcome to contribute.
Our aim is to increase the productivity in our research field. We believe that you should invest your time in actually solving a scientific problem (rather than spending your precious time developing yet another simulator). With openCARP, you can import CellML-based EP models to avoid error-prone and time-demanding manual implementation. Additionally, we will offer the service to upload in silico experiments (based on CARPutils) of your published studies to share it with your colleagues for a more transparent and better reproducable cardiac modeling research.
The openCARP collaboration
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 have released the first version in March 2020. Beside the four group leaders, the core developer Aurel Neic from NumeriCor joined the openCARP steering committee in November 2019.
Attribution
If you use this software, please cite the paper describing it as below. Specific versions of the software can additionally be referenced using individual DOIs. When presenting work based on openCARP, we suggest to display our logo.
Plank, G., Loewe A., Neic. A et al. (2021). The openCARP simulation environment for cardiac electrophysiology. Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine 2021;208:106223. doi:10.1016/j.cmpb.2021.106223
@article{openCARP,
author = {Gernot Plank and Axel Loewe and Aurel Neic and Christoph Augustin and Yung-Lin Huang and Matthias A.F. Gsell and Elias Karabelas and Mark Nothstein and Jorge Sanchez and Anton J Prassl and Gunnar Seemann and Edward J Vigmond},
title = {The {openCARP} Simulation Environment for Cardiac Electrophysiology},
pages = {106223},
volume = {208},
journal = {Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine},
doi = {10.1016/j.cmpb.2021.106223},
year = {2021}
}