An algorithm for efficient computation of spatial impulse response on the GPU with application in ultrasound simulation

Abstract

Computation of the spatial impulse response (SIR) is a time-consuming but fundamental step in the computation of the linear ultrasonic fields in homogeneous media and the scattering fields in the presence of non-homogeneity. In this paper, we present a new algorithm for the computation of the SIR which is suitable for parallelization on massively multiprocessing platforms. The algorithm is numerically stable and can be used with double and single precision arithmetic. We present an implementation of the algorithm for CUDA-enabled GPUs. The results demonstrate a significant speedup (85-fold) in comparison with the state-of-the-art (implemented in Field II) and take us closer to the goal of accurate simulation of the ultrasound fields in real-time.