Drraco: a gpu-based image processing toolkit for biplane fluoroscopy registration

A software toolkit, DRRACO, was developed to use a graphics processing unit (GPU) to perform image processing for biplane fluoroscopy analysis. The GPU is used to quickly generate digitally-reconstructed radiographs (DRRs) of bones, and uses GPU-accelerated image processing functions (convolution, dilation, and image similarity calculations) to compare the bone DRRs to a synchronized pair of frames from high-speed fluoroscopy video to derive bone and joint kinematics. The GPU provides a marked speedup (over 100x) over our previously-developed non-parallel implementation of this algorithm, with comparable registration accuracy. This speedup allows analysis of biplane fluoroscopy data to become feasible for large research studies.