Chapter 50: Fast Simulation of Radiographic Images Using a Monte Carlo X-Ray Transport Algorithm

Submitted by andreu on Fri, 02/04/2011 - 12:09 CST

MC-GPU is a GPU-accelerated x-ray transport simulation code that can generate clinically-realistic radiographic projection images and computed tomography (CT) scans of the human anatomy.

MC-GPU implements a massively multi-threaded Monte Carlo simulation algorithm for the transport of x rays in a voxelized geometry and uses the x-ray interaction models and cross sections from PENELOPE 2006. The code can handle realistic human anatomy phantoms, for example the freely available models from the Virtual Family. Electron transport is not implemented. The code has been developed using the CUDA programming model and the simulation can be executed in parallel in state-of-the-art GPUs from NVIDIA Corporation (Santa Clara, CA, USA). Typically, a 10 to 25-fold speed up is obtained using a GPU compared to a CPU execution.

Code: 

MC-GPU is being developed at the U. S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The code is in the public domain and can be downloaded from the website: http://code.google.com/p/mcgpu/.

The code was first introduced in the paper listed below, which should be referenced by researchers using this code. The software is also described in chapter 50 of the book GPU Computing Gems (Emerald Edition) edited by Wen-mei W. Hwu.

  • Andreu Badal and Aldo Badano, "Accelerating Monte Carlo simulations of photon transport in a voxelized geometry using a massively parallel Graphics Processing Unit", Medical Physics 36, pp. 4878–4880 (2009).

 

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