Interactive physically-based X-ray simulation: CPU or GPU?

Interventional Radiology (IR) procedures are minimally invasive, targeted treatments performed using imaging for guidance. Needle puncture using ultrasound, x-ray, or computed tomography (CT) images is a core task in the radiology curriculum, and we are currently developing a training simulator for this. One requirement is to include support for physically-based simulation of x-ray images from CT data sets. In this paper, we demonstrate how to exploit the capability of today's graphics cards to efficiently achieve this on the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and compare performance with an efficient software only implementation using the Central Processing Unit (CPU).