Medical Image Segmentation with Split-and-Merge Method

Abstract — The processing of microscopic tissue images and especially the detection of cell nuclei is nowadays done more and more using digital imagery and special immunodiagnostic software products. One of the most promising methods is region growing but it is quite memory intensive. The size of high-resolution tissue images can easily reach the order of a hundred megabytes therefore the memory requirement for the region growing is more than one gigabyte. To provide the execution in low-end clients we have to split the whole image into smaller tiles and after the processing of each individual tiles we have to merge the results. Keywords—medical image segmentation, parallel algorithm, gpgpu, split-and-merge I