Abstract:
The calculation of correlation is critically important for ultrasound strain elastography. The sum-table based method for the calculation of the normalized correlation coefficient (ST-NCC) can greatly improve computational efficiency under an environment of serial computing. Its implementation and performance are yet to be investigated when given a parallel computing platform, particularly, under a GPU environment. In this study, the published ST-NCC method was implemented into GPU and its performance was evaluated for speckle tracking. Particularly, the performance of the ST-NCC method was compared to the classic method of computing NCC using simulated ultrasound data. Our preliminary results indicated that, under the GPU platform, the implemented ST-NCC method did not further improve the computational efficiency, as compared to the classic NCC method implemented into the same GPU platform.