MC-GPU is a GPU-accelerated x-ray transport simulation code that can generate clinically-realistic radiographic projection images and computed tomography (CT) scans of the human anatomy.

MC-GPU implements a massively multi-threaded Monte Carlo simulation algorithm for the transport of x rays in a voxelized geometry and uses the x-ray interaction models and cross sections from PENELOPE 2006. The code can handle realistic human anatomy phantoms, for example the freely available models from the Virtual Family. Electron transport is not implemented. The code has been developed using the CUDA programming model and the simulation can be executed in parallel in state-of-the-art GPUs from NVIDIA Corporation (Santa Clara, CA, USA). An MPI library is used to address multiple GPUs in parallel during the CT simulations. In typical diagnostic imaging simulations, a 15 to 30-fold speed up is obtained using a GPU compared to a CPU execution.

The website from which the source code, executables and user guide may be obtained (without charge) is http://code.google.com/p/mcgpu/

Please address any questions or suggestions to Dr. Aldo Badano at 301-796-2534 or [email protected]

 

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