Biomedical image processing with GPGPU using CUDA

The main aim of this work is to show, how the GPGPUs can be used to speed up certain image processing methods. The algorithm explained in this paper is used to detect nuclei on (HE - hematoxilin eosin) stained colon tissue sample images, and includes a Gauss blurring, an RGB-HSV color space conversion, a fixed binarization, an ultimate erode procedure and a local maximum search. Since the images retrieved from the digital slides require significant storage space (up to few hundred megapixels), the usage of GPGPUs to speed up image processing operations is necessary in the interest of achieving reasonable processing time. The CUDA software development kit was used to develop algorithms to GPUs made by NVIDIA. This work focuses on how to achieve coalesced global memory access when working with three-channel RGB images, and how to use the on-die shared memory efficiently. The exact test algorithm also included a linear connected component labeling, which was running on the CPU, and with iterative optimization of the GPU code, we managed to achieve significant speed up in well defined test environment.