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:

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User Meeting

The 6th openCARP workshop will take place from November 11-13 of May 2024 in Graz, Austria. Registration will open in early summer 24. Further information about openCARP workshops can be found in the section openCARP user meeting. Stay informed and subscribe 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. Currently, openCARP is supported by CARPe-diem and MICROCARD, a project that has received funding from the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking EuroHPC (JU) under grant agreement No 955495. The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Norway, Switzerland.

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.

@article{openCARP-paper,
    author = {Plank*, Gernot and Loewe*, Axel and Neic*, Aurel and Augustin, Christoph and Huang, Yung-Lin (Cary) and Gsell, Matthias and Karabelas, Elias and Nothstein, Mark and Sánchez, Jorge and Prassl, Anton and Seemann*, Gunnar and Vigmond*, Ed},
    title = {The {openCARP} Simulation Environment for Cardiac Electrophysiology},
    journal = {Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine},
    year = {2021},
    pages = {106223},
    volume = {208},
    doi = {10.1016/j.cmpb.2021.106223}
}
@software{openCARP-sw,
    author = {{openCARP consortium} and Augustin, Christoph and Boyle, Patrick M. and Chegini, Fatemeh and Colin, Raphaël and Huppé, Atoli and Gerach, Tobias and Gsell, Matthias and Houillon, Marie and Huang, Yung-Lin (Cary) and Huppé, Atoli and Hustad, Kristian Gregorius and Karabelas, Elias and Krauß, Jonathan and Linder, Moritz and Loechner, Vincent and Loewe, Axel and Myklebust, Lena and Neic, Aurel and Nothstein, Mark and Plank, Gernot and Prassl, Anton and Sánchez, Jorge and Seemann, Gunnar and Stary, Tomas and Thangamani, Arun and Tippmann, Nico and Trevisan Jost, Tiago and Vigmond, Ed and Wülfers, Eike Moritz and Linder, Moritz and Barrios Espinosa, Cristian and Appel, Stephanie},
    title = {{openCARP}},
    year = {2025},
    doi = {10.35097/bs2x5z2h3tcf2spe},
    version = {v18.0},
    license = {ACADEMIC PUBLIC LICENSE (openCARP, v1.1)},
    url = {https://git.opencarp.org/openCARP/openCARP}
}