Real-time brain extraction method from cerebral MRI volume based on graphic processing units

In this paper, we proposed a method for accelerating brain extraction computations from cerebral MRI volume using compute unified device architecture (CUDA) based on multi-core graphic processing units (GPU). This algorithm is based on the well-known brain extraction method—Brain Extraction Tool (BET). In order to significantly reduce the computational time for real-time processing, the algorithm was performed in a parallel way by assigning one thread in GPU to calculate the new position of one vertex on the brain surface and all the vertices on the brain surface on one slice are processed in the same thread block, thus all the positions of the vertices on the brain’s surface can be updated in the same time. Experiments showed the computational time of this parallel method was less than one second and much less than that of normal BET. A slice-by-slice way was also used to improve the accuracy of our algorithm, and both the result and consuming time are desirable.