Philips Medical Systems is sponsoring research at King’s College London and University College London that is making image acquisition from MRI machines faster thanks to new graphics cards, and new algorithmic techniques to sharpen images of the often blurry beating heart and breathing lungs.
The Engineer Online reports:
In 2006, the scientists tried to increase the speed of image reconstruction by running the algorithms on a computing cluster with 60 computer nodes, each of which is a 64-bit machine. The cost of using that platform, around £15,000, proved to be too much however, and the scientists have now developed reconstruction algorithms that run on graphics cards — a much cheaper option at £500 a card.
‘The reconstructions are really advanced and take up a lot of computer processing power. At the moment, the processing power of computers is in saturation at something like 2.5GHz.
‘If you look at the graphics card, each year a new one comes out, these have something like 128 processors. The reason for this is the games industry. It is amazing how much the power of the cards increases annually by putting on more processors and more memory,’ said Schaeffter.
UCL’s Dr David Atkinson added: ‘The reconstruction of data into an image has historically been time-consuming and for some schemes, it takes longer than the acquisition itself. By using graphics cards, we have been able to get the image reconstruction time down to less than the acquisition time.’
Read on at the The Engineer Online…
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