Pathological Image Analysis Using the GPU: Stroma Classification for Neuroblastoma

Neuroblastoma is one of the most malignant childhood cancers affecting infants mostly. The current prognosis is based on microscopic examination of slides by expert pathologists, a process that is error-prone, time consuming and may lead to inter- and intra-reader variations. Therefore, we are developing a Computer Aided Prognosis (CAP) system which provides computerized image analysis to assist pathologist in their prognosis. Since this system operates on relatively large- scale images and requires sophisticated algorithms, it takes a long time to process whole-slide images. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient approach for the execution of a CAP system for neuroblastoma prognosis, using the graphics processing unit (GPU). By leveraging high memory bandwidth and strong floating point operation capabilities of the GPU, our goal is to achieve order of magnitude reduction in the overall execution time as compared to that on a CPU alone. The proposed approach was tested on a set of testing images with a promising accuracy of 99.4% and an execution performance gain factor up to 45 times compared to C++ code running on the CPU.