High-Performance and Real-Time Volume Rendering in CUDA

In order to improve the image quality and rendering speed, how to deal with a large scale of voxel computation is a challenge for programmers who work at medical image visualization. CUDA is a parallel programming model and software environment designed to overcome this challenge while maintaining a low learning curve for programmers familiar with standard programming languages such as C. In this paper, we propose an optimization algorithm of volume ray casting using CUDA; compare the performance to previous implementation in old version of GPU. The experiments show that our method can achieve a high image quality and rendering speed.