title: Mapping high-fidelity volume rendering for medical imaging to CPU, GPU and many-core architectures.
abstract: Medical volumetric imaging requires high fidelity, high performance rendering algorithms. We motivate and analyze new volumetric rendering algorithms that are suited to modern parallel processing architectures. First, we describe the three major categories of volume rendering algorithms and confirm through an imaging scientist-guided evaluation that ray-casting is the most acceptable. We describe a thread- and data-parallel implementation of ray-casting that makes it amenable to key architectural trends of three modern commodity parallel architectures: multi-core, GPU, and an upcoming many-core Intel architecture code-named Larrabee. We achieve more than an order of magnitude performance improvement on a number of large 3D medical datasets. We further describe a data compression scheme that significantly reduces data-transfer overhead. This allows our approach to scale well to large numbers of Larrabee cores.
authors.affiliation: Intel Corporation. mikhail.smelyanskiy@intel.com
authors.forename: Mikhail
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Smelyanskiy
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Holmes
authors.forename: Jatin
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Chhugani
authors.forename: Alan
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Larson
authors.forename: Douglas M
authors.initials: DM
authors.lastname: Carmean
authors.forename: Dennis
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Hanson
authors.forename: Pradeep
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Dubey
authors.forename: Kurt
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Augustine
authors.forename: Daehyun
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.forename: Alan
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kyker
authors.forename: Victor W
authors.initials: VW
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.forename: Anthony D
authors.initials: AD
authors.lastname: Nguyen
authors.forename: Larry
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Seiler
authors.forename: Richard
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Robb
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D003196:Computer Graphics; D016208:Databases, Factual; D003952:Diagnostic Imaging / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D011860:Radiography, Abdominal; D014057:Tomography, X-Ray Computed