Simulation of X-ray Attenuation on the GPU

Abstract

In this paper, we propose to take advantage of computer graphics hardware to achieve an accelerated simulation of X-ray transmission imaging, and we compare results with a fast and robust software-only implementation. The running times of the GPU and CPU implementations are compared in different test cases. The results show that the GPU implementation with full floating point precision is faster by a factor of about 60 to 65 than the CPU implementation, without any significant loss of accuracy. The increase in performance achieved with GPU calculations opens up new perspectives. Notably, it paves the way for physically-realistic simulation of X-ray imaging in interactive time.