Real-Time Scan Conversion for Ultrasound Imaging Based on CUDA with Direct3D Display

Ultrasonic scan conversion (SC) is one of the most important and widely-used technology in Medical Ultrasound Imaging. However, real-time processing of SC is computationally intensive, involving in calculation of inverse tangents, square roots to determine the scanning angle and depth of a beam followed by interpolation both in axial and lateral directions. In this paper, a very efficient implementation of ultrasonic scan conversion on the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA™) platform developed by NVIDIA® and using the interoperability of Direct3D (D3D) and CUDA to display is presented. By exploiting the implicit parallelism and reasonable performance optimization strategies based on the graphics hardware, this parallel scan conversion algorithm obtains a high speed up. It achieves a frame rate of about more than 746 fps with the picture size of 3121* 936, which is about 300 times faster than the CPU implementation.