Parallel Mean Shift for Interactive Volume Segmentation

In this paper we present a parallel dynamic mean shift algorithm based on path transmission for medical volume data segmentation. The algorithm first translates the volume data into a joint position-color feature space subdivided uniformly by bandwidths, and then clusters points in feature space in parallel by iteratively finding its peak point. Over iterations it improves the convergent rate by dynamically updating data points via path transmission and reduces the amount of data points by collapsing overlapping points into one point. The GPU implementation of the algorithm can segment 256x256x256 volume in 6 seconds using an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX card for interactive processing, which is hundreds times faster than its CPU implementation. We also introduce an interactive interface to segment volume data based on this GPU implementation. This interface not only provides the user with the capability to specify segmentation resolution, but also allows the user to operate on the segmented tissues and create desired visualization results.