Fast blood flow visualization of high-resolution laser speckle imaging data using graphics processing unit

Laser speckle contrast analysis (LASCA) is a non-invasive, fullfield optical technique that produces two-dimensional map of blood flow in biological tissue by analyzing speckle images captured by CCD camera. Due to the heavy computation required for speckle contrast analysis, video frame rate visualization of blood flow which is essentially important for medical usage is hardly achieved for the high-resolution image data by using the CPU (Central Processing Unit) of an ordinary PC (Personal Computer). In this paper, we introduced GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) into our data processing framework of laser speckle contrast imaging to achieve fast and high-resolution blood flow visualization on PCs by exploiting the high floating-point processing power of commodity graphics hardware. By using GPU, a 12-60 fold performance enhancement is obtained in comparison to the optimized CPU implementations. (c) 2008 Optical Society of America.