Diffusion tensor fiber tracking on graphics processing units

Abstract

Diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging has been successfully applied to the process of fiber tracking, which determines the location of fiber bundles within the human brain. This process, however, can be quite lengthy when run on a regular workstation. We present a means of executing this process by making use of the graphics processing units of computers’ video cards, which provide a low-cost parallel execution environment that algorithms like fiber tracking can benefit from. With this method we have achieved performance gains varying from 14 to 40 times on common computers. Because of accuracy issues inherent to current graphics processing units, we define a variation index in order to assess how close the results obtained with our method are to those generated by programs running on the central processing units of computers. This index shows that results produced by our method are acceptable when compared to those of traditional programs.