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Web‐based, GPU‐accelerated, Monte Carlo simulation and visualization of indirect radiation imaging detector performance
Author(s) -
Dong Han,
Sharma Diksha,
Badano Aldo
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
medical physics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.473
H-Index - 180
eISSN - 2473-4209
pISSN - 0094-2405
DOI - 10.1118/1.4901516
Subject(s) - computer science , mantis , visualization , artificial intelligence , ecology , biology
Purpose: Monte Carlo simulations play a vital role in the understanding of the fundamental limitations, design, and optimization of existing and emerging medical imaging systems. Efforts in this area have resulted in the development of a wide variety of open‐source software packages. One such package, hybrid mantis , uses a novel hybrid concept to model indirect scintillator detectors by balancing the computational load using dual CPU and graphics processing unit (GPU) processors, obtaining computational efficiency with reasonable accuracy. In this work, the authors describe two open‐source visualization interfaces, web mantis and visual mantis to facilitate the setup of computational experiments via hybrid mantis . Methods: The visualization tools visual mantis and web mantis enable the user to control simulation properties through a user interface. In the case of web mantis , control via a web browser allows access through mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets. web mantis acts as a server back‐end and communicates with an NVIDIA GPU computing cluster that can support multiuser environments where users can execute different experiments in parallel. Results: The output consists of point response and pulse‐height spectrum, and optical transport statistics generated by hybrid mantis . The users can download the output images and statistics through a zip file for future reference. In addition, web mantis provides a visualization window that displays a few selected optical photon path as they get transported through the detector columns and allows the user to trace the history of the optical photons. Conclusions: The visualization tools visual mantis and web mantis provide features such as on the fly generation of pulse‐height spectra and response functions for microcolumnar x‐ray imagers while allowing users to save simulation parameters and results from prior experiments. The graphical interfaces simplify the simulation setup and allow the user to go directly from specifying input parameters to receiving visual feedback for the model predictions.