Efficient ray casting with LF-Minmax map in CUDA
Jae Jeong Choi · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2011
Ray casting is the most frequently used algorithm in direct volume rendering for displaying medical data, although it is computationally very expensive. Recent hardware improvements have allowed ray casting to be used in real-time, however, there is room for performance gains to take advantage of the recent development of general-purpose graphical processing units (GPU). The purpose of this paper is to implement the volume ray casting with the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) to obtain higher rendering performance. The experimental results show that the new algorithm is up to 15 times faster than the conventional CPU-based ray casting algorithm.