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

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.