GPU-based acceleration of an automatic white matter segmentation algorithm using CUDA

Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2013:2013:89-92. doi: 10.1109/EMBC.2013.6609444.

Abstract

This paper presents a parallel implementation of an algorithm for automatic segmentation of white matter fibers from tractography data. We execute the algorithm in parallel using a high-end video card with a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) as a computation accelerator, using the CUDA language. By exploiting the parallelism and the properties of the memory hierarchy available on the GPU, we obtain a speedup in execution time of 33.6 with respect to an optimized sequential version of the algorithm written in C, and of 240 with respect to the original Python/C++ implementation. The execution time is reduced from more than two hours to only 35 seconds for a subject dataset of 800,000 fibers, thus enabling applications that use interactive segmentation and visualization of small to medium-sized tractography datasets.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Brain Mapping
  • Databases, Factual
  • Diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted
  • Radiography
  • Software
  • White Matter / diagnostic imaging