Towards Breast Anatomy Simulation Using GPUs

We have developed a method for massively parallelized breast anatomy simulation and a corresponding GPU implementation using OpenCL. The simulation method utilizes an octree data structure for recursively splitting the simulated tissue volume. Several strategies to optimize the GPU utilization were proposed and evaluated, including the use of synchronization constructs in the language and minimization of buffer allocations. The task of tissue classification was separated from the voxelization to further improve the balance of the control flow. The proposed anatomy simulation method provides for fast generation of high-resolution anthropomorphic breast phantoms. Currently, it is possible to generate an octree representation of 450 ml breasts with 50 μm voxel size on a AMD Radeon 6950 GPU with 2GB of memory at a rate of 7 phantoms per minute, 32 times faster than a multithreaded C++ implementation.