Focused ultrasound - Efficient GPU simulation methods for therapy planning

Over the past years, high intensity focused ultrasound therapy has become a promising therapeutic alternative for non-invasive tumor treatment. The basic idea of this interventional approach is to apply focused ultrasound waves to the tumor tissue such that the cells are heated and hence destroyed. Since it is quite difficult to assess the quality of this non-invasive therapy, there is a dire need for computer support in planning, conduction, and monitoring of such treatments. In this work, we propose efficient simulation techniques for focused ultrasound waves as well as their heat dissemination using current graphics hardware as a numerical co-processor. We achieve speed-ups between 10 and 700 for the single simulation steps compared to an optimized CPU solution, overall resulting in a significant performance gain over previous approaches for simulation of focused ultrasound.