A New Parallel Approach for Accelerating the GPU-Based Execution of Edge Detection Algorithms.

Real-time image processing is used in a wide variety of applications like those in medical care and industrial processes. This technique in medical care has the ability to display important patient information graphi graphically, which can supplement and help the treatment process. Medical decisions made based on real-time images are more accurate and reliable. According to the recent researches, graphic processing unit (GPU) programming is a useful method for improving the speed and quality of medical image processing and is one of the ways of real-time image processing. Edge detection is an early stage in most of the image processing methods for the extraction of features and object segments from a raw image. The Canny method, Sobel and Prewitt filters, and the Roberts' Cross technique are some examples of edge detection algorithms that are widely used in image processing and machine vision. In this work, these algorithms are implemented using the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA), Open Source Computer Vision (OpenCV), and Matrix Laboratory (MATLAB) platforms. An existing parallel method for Canny approach has been modified further to run in a fully parallel manner. This has been achieved by replacing the breadth- first search procedure with a parallel method. These algorithms have been compared by testing them on a database of optical coherence tomography images. The comparison of results shows that the proposed implementation of the Canny method on GPU using the CUDA platform improves the speed of execution by 2-100× compared to the central processing unit-based implementation using the OpenCV and MATLAB platforms.

Evolutionary Dynamics of Tumor-Stroma Interactions in Multiple Myeloma.

Cancer cells and stromal cells cooperate by exchanging diffusible factors that sustain tumor growth, a form of frequency-dependent selection that can be studied in the framework of evolutionary game theory. In the case of multiple myeloma, three types of cells (malignant plasma cells, osteoblasts and osteoclasts) exchange growth factors with different effects, and tumor-stroma interactions have been analysed using a model of cooperation with pairwise interactions. Here we show that a model in which growth factors have autocrine and paracrine effects on multiple cells, a more realistic assumption for tumor-stroma interactions, leads to different results, with implications for disease progression and treatment. In particular, the model reveals that reducing the number of malignant plasma cells below a critical threshold can lead to their extinction and thus to restore a healthy balance between osteoclast and osteoblast, a result in line with current therapies against multiple myeloma.