Efficient rendering of digitally reconstructed radiographs on heterogeneous computing architectures using central slice theorem

Digitally reconstructed radiographs (DRRs) play a significant role in modern clinical radiation therapy. They are used to verify patient alignments during image guided therapies with 2D-3D image registration. The generation of DRRs can be implemented intuitively in O(N
³
) relying on direct volume rendering (DVR) methods, such as ray marching. This complexity imposes certain limitations on the rendering performance if high quality DRR images are needed. Those DRRs can be alternatively generated in the k-space using the central slice theorem in O(N
²
logN). Several rendering pipelines have been designed to create the DRRs in the k-space, but they were either limited to specific vendor or entail particular software requirements. We present a high performance implementation of a k-space-based DRR generation pipeline that is executable on various heterogeneous computing architectures using OpenCL. Our implementation generates a DRR for a 512
³
CT volume in 6, 2.7 and 0.68 milli-seconds on a commodity CPU, mid-range and high-end GPUs respectively.