Hardware Acceleration with Its Applications into the Three-Dimensional Medical Image Reconstruction

processors, hardware acceleration, parallel processing Computed Tomography (CT) has been a very important noninvasive tool in diagnostic medicine. In fact, the use of cone-beam projection based CT is growing in the clinical area due to its ability to provide three-dimensional (3D) information; also, the cone-beam CT can scan a wider area, in a shorter time, than the multi-slice CT. Rapid volumetric image reconstruction is of paramount importance to clinicians for prompt diagnosis and analysis of complex tissue alternations. However, due to a high demand on computation for either the analytical or iterative image reconstruction algorithms, it is almost impossible to meet the requirement of real-time reconstruction. Recent growing developments in the area of hardware accelerating device, such as multi-core processors or Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) provide new and low-cost solutions to the digital signal processing, image processing or scientific problems that involve intensive and high-complexity computations. This project aims to parallelize and implement a variety of 3D image reconstruction algorithms on a number of existing multi-core or GPU platform systems. Then, we will further evaluate the performances obtained from the different hardware-accelerated platform systems as well as parallelism strategies proposed in this project.

Project ID:PB9907-10777
External Project ID:NSC99-2221-E182-020