Visualization and GPU-accelerated simulation of medical ultrasound from CT images.

We present a fast GPU-based method for simulation of ultrasound images from volumetric CT scans and their visualization. The method uses a ray-based model of the ultrasound to generate view-dependent ultrasonic effects such as occlusions, large-scale reflections and attenuation combined with speckle patterns derived from pre-processing the CT image using a wave-based model of ultrasound propagation in soft tissue. The main applications of the method are ultrasound training and registration of ultrasound and CT images.