A GPU-based implementations of the fuzzy C-means algorithms for medical image segmentation

Fuzzy clustering is one of the most popular techniques in medical image segmentation. The fuzzy C-means (FCM) algorithm has been widely used as it provides better performance and more information than other algorithms. As the data set becomes large, the serial implementation of the FCM algorithm becomes too slow to accomplish the clustering task within acceptable time. Hence, a parallel implementation [for example, using today’s fast graphics processing unit (GPU)] is needed. In this paper, we implement brFCM algorithm, a faster variant of the FCM algorithm, on two different GPU cards, Tesla M2070 and Tesla K20m. We compare our brFCM GPU-based implementation with its CPU-based sequential implementation. Moreover, we compare brFCM with the traditional version of the FCM algorithm. The experiments used lung CT and knee MRI images for clustering. The results show that our implementation has a significant improvement over the traditional CPU sequential implementation. GPU parallel brFCM is 2.24 times faster than its CPU implementation, and 23.43 times faster than a GPU parallel implementation of the traditional FCM.