Graphics Processing Unit-Based High Frame Rate Ultrasonic Tissue Motion Visualization

Ultrasonic tissue motion can be visualized in three steps: the gray scale motion detection, the Unsteady Flow Line Integral Convolution (UFLIC) algorithm to trace the velocity field, and display techniques for both the global motion and the local radial/tangential velocity components. Because of the large amount of data and high computational requirement in UFLIC, it was difficult to meet real-time requirement on CPU. In this paper a parallel algorithm based on the graphics processing unit (GPU) was proposed to implement ultrasonic tissue motion visualization, and it represented both the direction and amplitude of the motion by texture and color. Furthermore, a method was proposed to calculate the local radial/tangential velocity components. Finally, we got a frame rate of about more than 300 fps with the vector field size of 260x260.