Simulation of ultrasound (US) images from volumetric medical image data has been shown to be an important tool in medical image analysis. However, there is a tradeoff between the accuracy of the simulation and its real-time performance. In this paper, we present a framework for acceleration of ultrasound simulation on graphics processing unit (GPU) of commodity computer hardware. Our framework can accommodate ultrasound modeling with varying degrees of complexity. To demonstrate flexibility of our proposed method, we have implemented several models of acoustic propagation through 3D volumes. We conducted multiple experiments to evaluate the performance of our method for its application in multi-modal image registration and training. The results demonstrate the high performance of the GPU accelerated simulation outperforming CPU implementations by up to two orders of magnitude and encourage the investigation of even more realistic acoustic models.     «

Simulation of ultrasound (US) images from volumetric medical image data has been shown to be an important tool in medical image analysis. However, there is a tradeoff between the accuracy of the simulation and its real-time performance. In this paper, we present a framework for acceleration of ultrasound simulation on graphics processing unit (GPU) of commodity computer hardware. Our framework can accommodate ultrasound modeling with varying degrees of complexity. To demonstrate flexibility...     »