Fast GPU-Based Automatic Time Gain Compensation for Ultrasound Imaging

The Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) is a new programming platform making use of the unified shader design of the most current Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) from NVIDIA. In this paper, we apply this revolutionary new technology to implement the automatic time gain compensation (ATGC) for medical ultrasound imaging. The parallel box filtering method and general matrix computation algorithms are also presented. This ATGC method achieves a frame rate of 125 fps for the 512×261 image, about 79 times faster than the CPU implementation. Testing results from GPU and CPU are compared in terms of visual image quality and program runtime with different image sizes.