A Real-time Ultrasound Simulator Using Monte-Carlo Path Tracing in Conjunction with Optix Engine
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
12-14-2020
Department
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Abstract
Monte-Carlo ray tracing, which enables realistic simulation of ultrasound-tissue interactions such as soft shadows and fuzzy reflections, has been used to simulate ultrasound images. The main technical challenge presented with Monte-Carlo ray tracing is its computational efficiency. In this study, we investigated the use of a commercially-available ray-tracing engine (NVIDIA's Optix 6.0), which provides a simple, recursive, and flexible pipeline for accelerating ray tracing algorithms. Our preliminary results show that our ultrasound simulation algorithm accelerated by the Optix engine can achieve a frame of 25 frames/second using an Nvidia RTX 2060 card. Furthermore, we compare ultrasound simulations built on the proposed Monte-Carlo ray-tracing algorithm with a deep-learning generative adversarial network (GANs)-based ultrasound simulator and a physics-based ultrasound simulator (Field II). The proposed ultrasound simulator was able to better visualize small-sized structures while the other two above-mentioned simulators could not. Our future work includes integration of our proposed simulator with a virtual reality platform and expansion to other ultrasound modalities such as elastography and flow imaging.
Publication Title
IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems
ISBN
9781728185262
Recommended Citation
Wang, Q.,
Peng, B.,
Cao, Z.,
Huang, X.,
&
Jiang, J.
(2020).
A Real-time Ultrasound Simulator Using Monte-Carlo Path Tracing in Conjunction with Optix Engine.
IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems,
2020-October, 3661-3666.
http://doi.org/10.1109/SMC42975.2020.9283057
Retrieved from: https://digitalcommons.mtu.edu/michigantech-p/14560
Publisher's Statement
© 2020 IEEE. Publisher’s version of record: https://doi.org/10.1109/SMC42975.2020.9283057