A heterogeneous accelerator platform for multi-subject voxel-based brain network analysis

Abstract

The research on understanding the human brain has attracted more and more attention. A promising method is to model the brain as a network based on modern imaging technologies and then to apply graph theory algorithms for analysis. In this work, we examine the computing bottleneck of this method, and propose a CPU-GPU heterogeneous platform to accelerate the process. We construct a statistical brain network from a sample of 198 people and get characteristics such as nodal degree and modularity. This is the first study of voxel-based brain networks on large samples. We also illustrate that domain-specific hardware platform can have a significant impact on neuroscience studies.