A GPU accelerated virtual scanning confocal microscope

Fluorescence Recovery After Photobleaching (FRAP) is a commonly used technique for quantifying the movement of small biological systems. To aid in the evaluation of experimentally produced data, we used the parallel processing power offered by Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to accelerate a computational simulation of the process. We find that the parallel process is significantly faster when implemented on the GPU, and that further speed increases can be accomplished via various optimizations, bringing the speed increase up to a factor of one hundred in some cases.