Parallelizing strain estimation

Estimating deformation of biological tissue from ultrasound imaging using Normalized Cross Correlation (NCC) is very time-consuming. It would therefore benefit tremendously by a speedup. A major time-reduction could be achieved by parallelizing the separate computations of NCC. On simulated and in vivo data the OpenMP interface on a multi-CPU system has been investigated for parallelization of the NCC computations. The performance of the OpenMP-approach was assessed using 1, 4 and 8 threads. The results were compared with the MATLAB implementation of the same algorithm. The 8 threaded OpenMP approach achieved a maximum reduction factor in computation time of 130 for small templates and a maximum performance of 39 GFLOPS (24.4% of the system's single precision peak performance) for the largest template. Parallelization of NCC computations using OpenMP significantly reduces the computation time required for estimating deformation in biological tissue from hours to minutes.