Analysis of NVIDIA Optix Engine for Ray Tracing in SPECT

Type: Project

Status: running

Supervisors: Maximilian Reymann, Francesc Massanes (Siemens Medical Solutions USA, Inc.)

Looking for a student for the project: Analysis of NVIDIA Optix as a Ray Tracing platform for SPECT forward projection

Topic motivation

  • Ray tracing is massively used in videogames to determine what object within the scene should be shown in the viewpoint of the observer.
  • Furthermore Ray Tracing is also used to determine the shadows, lights and reflections to be portrayed in the screen.
  • Optix is an extremely powerful API designed by NVIDIA due to its modularity and its flexibility. In 2015, Optix was used to model a SPECT system, achieving a significant speed up over other simulation frameworks for the same task [1]

Project description

The project would consist of five parts:

  • Part I: Set up Optix as a ray tracing framework for nuclear imaging, without physics
  • Part II: Run a simulation with a simple SPECT parallel hole collimator
  • Part III: Set up Optix as a ray tracing framework for nuclear imaging, with physics
  • Part IV: Validation of the tool with simulated data from SIMIND (data provided)
  • Part V: Validation of the tool with data acquired from a system (data provided)

Success measurements:

  • Project would be considered successful after step II
  • At step IV, it could become a conference paper.

 

Other information:

  • Topic can be 5 or 10 ECTS Research/Master Project. Can also be extended to a thesis.
  • Contact: maximilian.reymann@fau.de
  • Applicants ideally have experience with C++ or GPU programming, or are looking to gain expertise in these areas.