Research On Volume Rendering And Electrophysiology Simulation Of Heart Based On GPU

Graphic Processing Unit is the most important part of the graphic card, which reduces the reliance on the CPU. Simultaneously, GPU improves the ability of image processing, especially in 3D image. With the development of technology, operational speed of GPU grows quickly, making the prospects of GPU-based applicatins bright.With the shading language, we can use the programmable imaging pipeline to realize complex effects. Due to the advantages in matrix computing and computing intensive operation, researchers tried to make GPU applied to high performance parallel computing field. These features enable the GPU applied in virtual cardiac modeling and visualization technology research.Heart is one of the most important organ of human being, which has layered complex structure. Volume rendering technology is used to visualize its 3D dataset. For the large dataset, the traditional method of volume rendering based on CPU is difficult to reach the interactive purpose. According to this problem, we adopt the method of volume rendering based on GPU to realize real-time visualization using the graphical processing advantage of GPU. This paper researches the GPU-based texture slicing and ray casting algorithm, and makes a comparison for their realization, performance and results.With normal volume rendering technology, the internal subtle tissues of heart are difficult to observe, so we design the transfer function with the histogram of graylevel, and modify the rendering results with gradient information. This algorithm is realized on the GPU-based ray casting platform.Electric physiology simulation of ventricle is important for researches on the relationship between the ion of heart cells and the voltage of heart surface. Electrophysiology simulation model is complex, because the types of ion are very complex, and there is a large amoun of cells. The computation is time consuming and needs well equipped computer. After analyzing the simulation model, it can be parallelized via GPU. And finally on the fly visualization of simulating result is provided, which is convenient for observing changes of voltage.In this paper, we build a platform for the visualization and physical simulation of heart by using the programmable pipeline and embedded parallel characteristics of GPU.