SRC® Medical Imaging Market -- Computed Tomography CT Scan Image Reconstruction, Positron Emission Tomography PET, Magnetic Resonance Imaging MRI

Markets & Applications

Medical Imaging

Overview & Challenges

The medical imaging market has grown significantly in recent years due to vast improvements in imaging technology. There are several extremely compute-intensive imaging techniques, or modalities, that require the use of image processing and reconstruction such as Positron Emission Tomography (PET), Computed Tomography (CT) Scan Image Reconstruction and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI).

Too often, a software application’s computational intensity limits the imaging details available to the medical professional. This problem is compounded as volumetric imaging fuses multiple modalities.

SRC^® Solutions
Ease of Programming with the Carte^™ Programming Environment
Performance Gains
Related White Papers
Related Articles
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Other Markets:

o Defense/National Security

o Quantitative Finance

o Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)

o Oil & Gas / Seismic Processing

o Scientific & Academic Research

SRC^® SOLUTIONS
The performance gains provided by the SRC MAPstation^™ workstations and Scalable Systems & Servers for medical visualization applications enable higher image resolution and clarity, draw significantly less power than traditional CPU-based systems, and enable faster image reconstruction. Learn more about MAPstation Workstations Learn more about Scalable Systems & Servers
EASE OF PROGRAMMING WITH THE CARTE^™ PROGRAMMING ENVIRONMENT
The SRC Carte Programming Environment takes high-level language C or Fortran code, compiles portions of it to run on the implicitly controlled microprocessors and creates the configuration information needed for the explicitly controlled reconfigurable MAP^® processors. Everything needed to control both types of processors is then combined by the Carte Programming Enviornment into a single Unified Executable. Carte software tools support code development and execution on the hardware, as well as in emulation and simulation environments. Learn more about the Carte Programming Environment
Performance Gains

SRC Application Results

The following table illustrates the performance advantage of a single SRC Series H MAP^® processor compared with a highly tuned code running on a standard microprocessor. The performance gains are achieved by the ability to implement a custom mix of functions for the subroutine.

Speedup numbers below include all overhead, including data movement. All data is for a single MAP processor or a single microprocessor core and assumed 100% scalability for the microprocessor cores. Comparisons of the MAP processor to actual microprocessor based systems would result in even higher speedups due to less than 100% scalability in multicore microprocessor systems.

APPLICATION	MAP PERFORMANCE	SPEEDUP: MAP PROCESSOR VS. STANDARD mP
Backprojection (CAT, MRI, PET scanning)	3.77 sec (5040 pulses, image size - 1002001 pixels)	38x*

* Speedup relative to a 3.0 GHz Xeon

Related White Papers*
Computed Tomography (CT) Scan Image Reconstruction on the SRC-7 The SRC-7 system architecture is well suited to accelerating of CT scan image reconstruction. In the simplest SRC-7 system implementation, a microprocessor is paired with a Series H MAP^® processor. These two processors working together achieve a 29x performance boost over the 3GHz 64-bit Xeon microprocessor working alone. This means that if a traditional computer takes 10 minutes to reconstruct a CT scan image, the SRC-7 system will take only 20 seconds to reconstruct the same image. SRC Computers' MAP Processors for Digital Image Processing From unmanned vehicles to medical to remote sensing applications, the architecture of the SRC^® MAP processor is well suited to high performance processing of large images from multiple sources. This paper presents several representative image processing algorithms implemented on the SRC-7 Series H MAP processor and compares their execution performance relative to a CPU. SRC MAPstation^™ Image Processing: Two Dimensional Floating Point Fast Fourier Transforms Using the complex floating point programmable FFT from SRC Computer’s image processing library, engineers have demonstrated a 2D FFT with a O(N) transpose operation. This means that every time image resolution grows by 2x, the image processing time grows by the same amount, thus allowing efficient and very high-resolution image processing in the frequency domain vs. traditional microprocessor methods. This O(N) transpose operation is achieved using the advanced memory architecture in the SRC Series H MAP processor. SRC MAPstation Image Processing: Intensity Histogram Given the importance of the histogram operation, SRC Computers recently developed a MAP histogram function specifically to support image applications. This paper will discuss this function as well as provide a detailed example of how to use the function in a MAP C program. Later papers will incorporate this simple function into real image applications and discuss realizable performance at the application level. IMPLICIT+EXPLICIT^™ Architecture This paper explains the innovative SRC IMPLICIT+EXPLICIT^™Architecture, which fully integrates Dense Logic Device (DLD) technology and reconfigurable Direct Execution Logic (DEL) with the Carte^™ Programming Environment, delivering orders of magnitude increases in performance. * Please e-mail marketing@srccomputers with your contact information to obtain copies of the papers listed here back to top
Related Articles
“Projecting” Images in Radar and Medical Applications DSP-FPGA.com Filtered backprojection is finding its way into both radar and medical imaging applications and is well served by FPGAs to handle a portion of the algorithm. The results are outstanding.
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Contact SRC Computers today to find out how you can get more performance per watt over traditional microprocessor-based systems. Call (719) 262-0213 or e-mail sales@srccomputers.com to speak with our applications experts.