High-speed volume ray casting with CUDA

Volume ray casting experiences a renewed interest in the last decade. Largely due to the graphics hardware, which enabled real-time implementations competitive in speed with slicing. However these implementations need specialized shader languages and are forced to use graphics APIs. It makes implementation of advanced methods difficult and hinders performance, bending the programming and execution model for something it was not designed to. In late 2006 a new generation of GPUs has been introduced together with CUDA, C-language API.