Fast 3D structure localization in medical volumes using CUDA-enabled GPUs

Effective and fast localization of anatomical structures is a crucial first step towards automated analysis of medical volumes. In this paper, we propose an iterative approach for structure localization in medical volumes based on the adaptive bandwidth mean-shift algorithm for object detection (ABMSOD). We extend and tune the ABMSOD algorithm, originally used to detect 2D objects in non-medical images, to localize 3D anatomical structures in medical volumes. For fast localization, we design and develop optimized parallel implementations of the proposed algorithm on multi-cores using OpenMP, and on GPUs using CUDA. We evaluate the quality, performance and scalability of the proposed algorithm on Computed Tomography (CT) volumes for various structures.