Fast Simulation of Dynamic Ultrasound Images Using the GPU

Simulated ultrasound data is a valuable tool for development and validation of quantitative image analysis methods in echocardiography. Unfortunately, simulation time can become prohibitive for phantoms consisting of a large number of point scatterers. The COLE algorithm by Gao et al. is a fast conv...

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Bibliographische Detailangaben
Veröffentlicht in:IEEE transactions on ultrasonics, ferroelectrics, and frequency control. - 1986. - 64(2017), 10 vom: 27. Okt., Seite 1465-1477
1. Verfasser: Storve, Sigurd (VerfasserIn)
Weitere Verfasser: Torp, Hans
Format: Online-Aufsatz
Sprache:English
Veröffentlicht: 2017
Zugriff auf das übergeordnete Werk:IEEE transactions on ultrasonics, ferroelectrics, and frequency control
Schlagworte:Journal Article Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Beschreibung
Zusammenfassung:Simulated ultrasound data is a valuable tool for development and validation of quantitative image analysis methods in echocardiography. Unfortunately, simulation time can become prohibitive for phantoms consisting of a large number of point scatterers. The COLE algorithm by Gao et al. is a fast convolution-based simulator that trades simulation accuracy for improved speed. We present highly efficient parallelized CPU and GPU implementations of the COLE algorithm with an emphasis on dynamic simulations involving moving point scatterers. We argue that it is crucial to minimize the amount of data transfers from the CPU to achieve good performance on the GPU. We achieve this by storing the complete trajectories of the dynamic point scatterers as spline curves in the GPU memory. This leads to good efficiency when simulating sequences consisting of a large number of frames, such as B-mode and tissue Doppler data for a full cardiac cycle. In addition, we propose a phase-based subsample delay technique that efficiently eliminates flickering artifacts seen in B-mode sequences when COLE is used without enough temporal oversampling. To assess the performance, we used a laptop computer and a desktop computer, each equipped with a multicore Intel CPU and an NVIDIA GPU. Running the simulator on a high-end TITAN X GPU, we observed two orders of magnitude speedup compared to the parallel CPU version, three orders of magnitude speedup compared to simulation times reported by Gao et al. in their paper on COLE, and a speedup of 27000 times compared to the multithreaded version of Field II, using numbers reported in a paper by Jensen. We hope that by releasing the simulator as an open-source project we will encourage its use and further development
Beschreibung:Date Completed 18.03.2019
Date Revised 18.03.2019
published: Print-Electronic
Citation Status MEDLINE
ISSN:1525-8955
DOI:10.1109/TUFFC.2017.2731944