GPU computing in medical physics: A review

The graphics processing unit (GPU) has emerged as a competitive platform for computing massively parallel problems. Many computing applications in medical physics can be formulated as data-parallel tasks that exploit the capabilities of the GPU for reducing processing times. The authors review the basic principles of GPU computing as well as the main performance optimization techniques, and survey existing applications in three areas of medical physics, namely image reconstruction, dose calculation and treatment plan optimization, and image processing. (C) 2011 American Association of Physicists in Medicine. [DOI: 10.1118/1.3578605]