Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationStochastic methods, dense free-form mapping, atlas construction, and total variation are examples of advanced image processing techniques which are robust but computationally demanding. These algorithms often require a large amount of computational power as well as massive memory bandwidth. These requirements used to be ful lled only by supercomputers. The development of heterogeneous parallel subsystems and computation-specialized devices such as Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) has brought the requisite power to commodity hardware, opening up opportunities for scientists to experiment and evaluate the in uence of these techniques on their research and practical applications. However, harnessing the processing power from modern hardware is challenging. The di fferences between multicore parallel processing systems and conventional models are signi ficant, often requiring algorithms and data structures to be redesigned signi ficantly for efficiency. It also demands in-depth knowledge about modern hardware architectures to optimize these implementations, sometimes on a per-architecture basis. The goal of this dissertation is to introduce a solution for this problem based on a 3D image processing framework, using high performance APIs at the core level to utilize parallel processing power of the GPUs. The design of the framework facilitates an efficient application development process, which does not require scientists to have extensive knowledge about GPU systems, and encourages them to harness this power to solve their computationally challenging problems. To present the development of this framework, four main problems are described, and the solutions are discussed and evaluated: (1) essential components of a general 3D image processing library: data structures and algorithms, as well as how to implement these building blocks on the GPU architecture for optimal performance; (2) an implementation of unbiased atlas construction algorithms|an illustration of how to solve a highly complex and computationally expensive algorithm using this framework; (3) an extension of the framework to account for geometry descriptors to solve registration challenges with large scale shape changes and high intensity-contrast di fferences; and (4) an out-of-core streaming model, which enables developers to implement multi-image processing techniques on commodity hardware

ISP: An optimal out-of-core image-set processing streaming architecture for parallel heterogeneous systems

Journal ArticleImage population analysis is the class of statistical methods that plays a central role in understanding the development, evolution, and disease of a population. However, these techniques often require excessive computational power and memory that are compounded with a large number of volumetric inputs. Restricted access to supercomputing power limits its influence in general research and practical applications. In this paper we introduce ISP, an Image-Set Processing streaming framework that harnesses the processing power of commodity heterogeneous CPU/GPU systems and attempts to solve this computational problem. In ISP, we introduce specially designed streaming algorithms and data structures that provide an optimal solution for out-of-core multiimage processing problems both in terms of memory usage and computational efficiency. ISP makes use of the asynchronous execution mechanism supported by parallel heterogeneous systems to efficiently hide the inherent latency of the processing pipeline of out-of-core approaches. Consequently, with computationally intensive problems, the ISP out-of-core solution can achieve the same performance as the in-core solution. We demonstrate the efficiency of the ISP framework on synthetic and real datasets

CLAIRE -- Parallelized Diffeomorphic Image Registration for Large-Scale Biomedical Imaging Applications

We study the performance of CLAIRE -- a diffeomorphic multi-node, multi-GPU image-registration algorithm, and software -- in large-scale biomedical imaging applications with billions of voxels. At such resolutions, most existing software packages for diffeomorphic image registration are prohibitively expensive. As a result, practitioners first significantly downsample the original images and then register them using existing tools. Our main contribution is an extensive analysis of the impact of downsampling on registration performance. We study this impact by comparing full-resolution registrations obtained with CLAIRE to lower-resolution registrations for synthetic and real-world imaging datasets. Our results suggest that registration at full resolution can yield a superior registration quality -- but not always. For example, downsampling a synthetic image from $1024^3$ to $256^3$ decreases the Dice coefficient from 92% to 79%. However, the differences are less pronounced for noisy or low-contrast high-resolution images. CLAIRE allows us not only to register images of clinically relevant size in a few seconds but also to register images at unprecedented resolution in a reasonable time. The highest resolution considered is CLARITY images of size $2816\times3016\times1162$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on image registration quality at such resolutions.Comment: 32 pages, 9 tables, 8 figure

Quicksilver: Fast Predictive Image Registration - a Deep Learning Approach

This paper introduces Quicksilver, a fast deformable image registration method. Quicksilver registration for image-pairs works by patch-wise prediction of a deformation model based directly on image appearance. A deep encoder-decoder network is used as the prediction model. While the prediction strategy is general, we focus on predictions for the Large Deformation Diffeomorphic Metric Mapping (LDDMM) model. Specifically, we predict the momentum-parameterization of LDDMM, which facilitates a patch-wise prediction strategy while maintaining the theoretical properties of LDDMM, such as guaranteed diffeomorphic mappings for sufficiently strong regularization. We also provide a probabilistic version of our prediction network which can be sampled during the testing time to calculate uncertainties in the predicted deformations. Finally, we introduce a new correction network which greatly increases the prediction accuracy of an already existing prediction network. We show experimental results for uni-modal atlas-to-image as well as uni- / multi- modal image-to-image registrations. These experiments demonstrate that our method accurately predicts registrations obtained by numerical optimization, is very fast, achieves state-of-the-art registration results on four standard validation datasets, and can jointly learn an image similarity measure. Quicksilver is freely available as an open-source software.Comment: Add new discussion

Distributed-memory large deformation diffeomorphic 3D image registration

We present a parallel distributed-memory algorithm for large deformation diffeomorphic registration of volumetric images that produces large isochoric deformations (locally volume preserving). Image registration is a key technology in medical image analysis. Our algorithm uses a partial differential equation constrained optimal control formulation. Finding the optimal deformation map requires the solution of a highly nonlinear problem that involves pseudo-differential operators, biharmonic operators, and pure advection operators both forward and back- ward in time. A key issue is the time to solution, which poses the demand for efficient optimization methods as well as an effective utilization of high performance computing resources. To address this problem we use a preconditioned, inexact, Gauss-Newton- Krylov solver. Our algorithm integrates several components: a spectral discretization in space, a semi-Lagrangian formulation in time, analytic adjoints, different regularization functionals (including volume-preserving ones), a spectral preconditioner, a highly optimized distributed Fast Fourier Transform, and a cubic interpolation scheme for the semi-Lagrangian time-stepping. We demonstrate the scalability of our algorithm on images with resolution of up to $1024^3$ on the "Maverick" and "Stampede" systems at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). The critical problem in the medical imaging application domain is strong scaling, that is, solving registration problems of a moderate size of $256^3$---a typical resolution for medical images. We are able to solve the registration problem for images of this size in less than five seconds on 64 x86 nodes of TACC's "Maverick" system.Comment: accepted for publication at SC16 in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA; November 201

Image registration driven by combined probabilistic and geometric descriptors

pre-printDeformable image registration in the presence of considerable contrast dierences and large-scale size and shape changes represents a signicant challenge for image registration. A representative driving application is the study of early brain development in neuroimaging, which requires co-registration of images of the same subject across time or building 4-D population atlases. Growth during the first few years of development involves significant changes in size and shape of anatomical structures but also rapid changes in tissue properties due to myeli-nation and structuring that are reflected in the multi-modal Magnetic Resonance (MR) contrast measurements. We propose a new registration method that generates a mapping between brain anatomies represented as a multi-compartment model of tissue class posterior images and geometries. We transform intensity patterns into combined probabilistic and geometric descriptors that drive the matching in a diffeomorphic framework, where distances between geometries are represented using currents which does not require geometric correspondence. We show preliminary results on the registrations of neonatal brain MRIs to two-year old infant MRIs using class posteriors and surface boundaries of structures undergoing major changes. Quantitative validation demonstrates that our proposed method generates registrations that better preserve the consistency of anatomical structures over time