A GPU-Based Fast Dynamic Volume Rendering Method for 4D Medical Images

Traditional 3D medical image reconstruction method cannot meet the needs of dynamic rendering for 4D medical image.Furthermore,the traditional method would have very low performance due to the large amount of 4D image data.Based on the above requirements,a high-speed dynamic volume rendering method for 4D medical image is proposed.A high-speed ray casting algorithm based on the power of parallel computing of GPU with the architecture of CUDA is presented.The framework of the algorithm,storage strategies of volume data and computing results,thread allocation and addressing strategy are analyzed.The process of 4D dynamic rendering is shown.This algorithm can assign the computing of per casting ray to each thread in the GPU parallel execution.Compared to traditional volume rendering algorithm,this algorithm provides great performance,and preserves the advantage of ray casting in visual quality.Experimental results show that high performance and smooth rendering of dynamic display can be obtained by the proposed algorithm.