GPU acceleration of time-domain fluorescence lifetime imaging

Abstract

© The Authors. Fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM) plays a significant role in biological sciences, chemistry, and medical research. We propose a graphic processing unit (GPU) based FLIM analysis tool suitable for high-speed, flexible time-domain FLIM applications. With a large number of parallel processors, GPUs can significantly speed up lifetime calculations compared to CPU-OpenMP (parallel computing with multiple CPU cores) based analysis. We demonstrate how to implement and optimize FLIM algorithms on GPUs for both iterative and noniterative FLIM analysis algorithms. The implemented algorithms have been tested on both synthesized and experimental FLIM data. The results show that at the same precision, the GPU analysis can be up to 24-fold faster than its CPU-OpenMP counterpart. This means that even for high-precision but time-consuming iterative FLIM algorithms, GPUs enable fast or even real-time analysis.