FFT and cone-beam CT reconstruction on graphics hardware

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Abstract
Graphics processing units (GPUs) are increasingly used for general purpose calculations. Their pipelined architecture can be exploited to accelerate various parallelizable algorithms. Medical imaging applications are inherently well suited to benefit from the development of GPU-based computational platforms. We evaluate in this work the potential of GPUs to improve the execution speed of two common medical imaging tasks, namely Fourier transforms and tomographic reconstructions. A two-dimensional fast Fourier transform (FFT) algorithm was GPU-implemented and compared, in terms of execution speed, to two popular CPU-based FFT routines. Similarly, the Feldkamp, David and Kress (FDK) algorithm for cone-beam tomographic reconstruction was implemented on the GPU and its performance compared to a CPU version. Different reconstruction strategies were employed to assess the performance of various GPU memory layouts. For the specific hardware used, GPU implementations of the FFT were up to 20 times faster than their CPU counterparts, but slower than highly optimized CPU versions of the algorithm. Tomographic reconstructions were faster on the GPU by a factor up to 30, allowing 2563 voxel reconstructions of 256 projections in about 20 seconds. Overall, GPUs are an attractive alternative to other imaging-dedicated computing hardware like application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) in terms of cost, simplicity and versatility. With the development of simpler language extensions and programming interfaces, GPUs are likely to become essential tools in medical imaging.

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