CUDA-Accelerated Geodesic Ray-Tracing for Fiber Tracking

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Evert van Aart, Neda Sepasian, Andrei Jalba, Anna Vilanova
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Wiley 2011-01-01
Series:International Journal of Biomedical Imaging
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2011/698908
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Summary: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.
ISSN:1687-4188
1687-4196