Real-time extraction of local phase features from volumetric medical image data

We present a novel real-time implementation of local phase feature extraction from volumetric image data based on 3D directional (log-Gabor) filters. We achieve drastic performance gains without compromising the signal-to-noise ratio by pre-computing the filters and adaptive noise estimation parameters, and streamlining the remainder of the computations to efficiently run on a multi-processor graphic processing unit (GPU). We validate our method on clinical ultrasound data and demonstrate a 15-fold speedup in computation time over state-of-the art methods, which could potentially facilitate a wide range of practical applications for real-time image-guided procedures.