The segmentation of cervical vertebra in X-Ray
radiographs can give valuable information for the study of the
vertebral mobility. One particular characteristic of the X-Ray images
is that they present very low grey level variation and makes
the segmentation difficult to perform. In this paper, we propose
a segmentation procedure based on the Active Shape Model
to deal with this issue. However, this application is seriously
hampered by its considerable computation time. We present how
vertebra extraction can efficiently be performed in exploiting the
vast processing power of the Graphics Processing Units (GPU).
We propose a CUDA-based GPU implementation of the most
intensive processing steps enabling to boost performance.
Experimentations have been conducted using a set of
high resolution X-Ray medical images, showing a global
speedup ranging from 15 to 21, by comparison with the CPU
implementation.