Use of transputers in a 3-D positron emission tomograph

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Abstract
The use of a VME-based transputer network as a parallel processing engine for positron volume imaging is dis- cussed. We find that the speedups of parallel networks depend on two major factors: the ratio of computation to communica- tion for a task, and the size of the task, and we give a simple model to explore the limits to speedups. Through actual imple- mentation we show that real-time PVI data acquisition can be achieved with about 20 transputer nodes, and we estimate that 3-D image reconstruction can be achieved within 10 min using 200 nodes. Larger images and a larger number of histograms can readily be accommodated using the same parallel algo- rithms as our model places no limits to the size of the images. The versatility and scalability of transputers makes them very suitable for use in PVI tomographs in that the same transputers can be used for speeding up data acquisition, image reconstruc- tion, and display.

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