Acceleration of Tear Film Map Definition on Multicore Systems

Abstract

Dry eye syndrome is a public health problem, and one of the most common conditions seen by eye care specialists. Among the clinical tests for its diagnosis, the evaluation of the interference patterns observed in the tear film lipid layer is often employed. In this sense, tear film maps illustrate the spatial distribution of the patterns over the whole tear film and provide useful information to practitioners. However, the creation of a single map usually takes tens of minutes. Medical experts currently demand applications with lower response time in order to provide a faster diagnosis for their patients. In this work, we explore different parallel approaches to accelerate the definition of the tear film map by exploiting the power of today's ubiquitous multicore systems. They can be executed on any multicore system without special software or hardware requirements. The experimental evaluation determines the best approach (on-demand with dynamic seed distribution) and proves that it can significantly decrease the runtime. For instance, the average runtime of our experiments with 50 real-world images on a system with AMD Opteron processors is reduced from more than 20 minutes to one minute and 12 seconds. © The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.