CUDA-Accelerated Geodesic Ray-Tracing for Fiber Tracking
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, 5600 MB Eindhove, The Netherlands
International Journal of Biomedical Imaging, Volume 2011, Article ID 698908, 12 pages, 2011
@article{van2011cuda,
title={CUDA-Accelerated Geodesic Ray-Tracing for Fiber Tracking},
author={van Aart, E. and Sepasian, N. and Jalba, A. and Vilanova, A.},
journal={International Journal of Biomedical Imaging},
volume={2011},
year={2011},
publisher={Hindawi Publishing Corporation}
}
Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) allows to noninvasively measure the diffusion of water in fibrous tissue. By reconstructing the fibers from DTI data using a fiber-tracking algorithm, we can deduce the structure of the tissue. In this paper, we outline an approach to accelerating such a fiber-tracking algorithm using a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). This algorithm, which is based on the calculation of geodesics, has shown promising results for both synthetic and real data, but is limited in its applicability by its high computational requirements. We present a solution which uses the parallelism offered by modern GPUs, in combination with the CUDA platform by NVIDIA, to significantly reduce the execution time of the fiber-tracking algorithm. Compared to a multithreaded CPU implementation of the same algorithm, our GPU mapping achieves a speedup factor of up to 40 times.
November 5, 2011 by hgpu
