Medical imaging currently plays a crucial role throughout the entire clinical applications frommedical scientific research to diagnostics and treatment planning. However, medical imaging proceduresare often computationally demanding due to the large three-dimensional (3D) medical datasets to processin practical clinical applications. With the rapidly enhancing performances of graphics processors, improvedprogramming support, and excellent price-to-performance ratio, the graphics processing unit (GPU) hasemerged as a competitive parallel computing platform for computationally expensive and demanding tasks ina wide range of medical image applications. The major purpose of this survey is to provide a comprehensivereference source for the starters or researchers involved in GPU-based medical image processing. Withinthis survey, the continuous advancement of GPU computing is reviewed and the existing traditionalapplications in three areas of medical image processing, namely, segmentation, registration and visualization,are surveyed. The potential advantages and associated challenges of current GPU-based medical imaging arealso discussed to inspire future applications in medicine.
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