Patent ID: 7653226

Claim:
A method for a graphics processing unit (GPU) to generate digitally reconstructed radiograph (DRR) images, the method performed by said GPU comprising the steps of: receiving three-dimensional (3D) volumetric data into a graphics pipeline, wherein said 3D volumetric data is stored as a 3D texture; integrating the 3D volumetric data into incremental line integrals along a plurality of viewing rays, wherein values of said incremental line integrals are stored as textures within the GPU; modeling composite line integrals from the incremental line integrals; adding the incremental line integrals for each composite line integral to form pixels of the DRR image; and correcting for non-uniform sampling distances due to the projection of a proxy-geometry by means of weighting factors, wherein each incremental line integral along a viewing ray is a weighted sum of rendered geometric elements, which are surface-textured by means of 3D texturing, and wherein line integral fragments are stored as textures within said GPU.