ATHENA: a GPU-based Framework for Biomedical 3D Rigid Image Registration.

3D image registration is one of the most complex algorithms employed in medical imaging applications. Software solution struggles to reach high accuracy in a reasonable time, therefore this work presents ATHENA, a framework for rigid 3D Image Registration, exploiting heterogeneous architecture for acceleration, and also providing support for memory-constrained devices. Moreover, ATHENA presents a tool for automatically generating misalignent between volumes, to perform a robustness analysis on different kinds of distortions. We compared ATHENA with SimpleITK, a well-known software library, and with a software version of the proposed algorithm, achieving a top speedup of 18.1× and 53.7× respectively.