Constructing a functional Fourier volume rendering pipeline on heterogeneous platforms

Abstract

Volume rendering became a crucial and significant tool in the medical field. This was due to the rapid evolution of imaging modalities such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machines, Computed Tomography (CT) scanners. Volume rendering techniques vary from category to another depending basically on the employed modality and eventually on the target application. Although spatial-domain volume rendering techniques have gained a wide acceptance during the past decades, however, they suffer from performance bottlenecks due to their O(N3) complexity for a volume of size N3. Fourier Volume Rendering (FVR) is an alternative technique that works on the k-space representation of the volume with reduced complexity of O(N2logN) for generating projection images of the spatial volume that look like X-ray ones. In this work, a functional hybrid implementation of the FVR pipeline on Central Processing Units (CPUs) and Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) is presented.