Efficient 3D Nonlinear Warping of Computed Tomography: Two High Performance Implementations using OpenGL

摘要

We have implemented two hardware accelerated Thin Plate Spline (TPS) warping algorithms. The first algorithm is a hardware-software approach (HW-TPS) that uses OpenGL Vertex Shaders to perform a grid warp. The second is a Graphics Processor based approach (GPU-TPS) that uses the OpenGL Shading Language to perform all warping calculations on the GPU. Comparison with a software TPS algorithm was used to gauge the speed and quality of both hardware algorithms. Quality was analyzed visually and using the Sum of Absolute Difference (SAD) similarity metric. Warping was performed using 92 user-defined displacement vectors for 512x512x173 serial lung CT studies, matching normal-breathing and deep-inspiration scans. On a Xeon 2.2 Ghz machine with an ATI Radeon 9800XT GPU the GPU-TPS required 26.1 seconds to perform a per-voxel warp compared to 148.2 seconds for the software algorithm. The HW-TPS needed 1.63 seconds to warp the same study while the GPU-TPS required 1.94 seconds and the software grid transform required 22.8 seconds. The SAD values calculated between the outputs of each algorithm and the target CT volume were 15.2%, 15.4% and 15.5% for the HW-TPS, GPU-TPS and both software algorithms respectively. The computing power of ubiquitous 3D graphics cards can be exploited in medical image processing to provide order of magnitude acceleration of nonlinear warping algorithms without sacrificing output quality.