Real-time computed tomography on the cell broadband engine processor

Tomographic image reconstruction is computationally very demanding. In all cases the backprojection represents the performance bottleneck due to the high operational count and resulting high demand put on the memory subsystem. In this study, we present the implementation of a cone beam reconstruction algorithm on the Cell Broadband Engine (CBE) processor aimed at real-time applications. The cone-beam backprojection performance was assessed by backprojecting a half-circle scan of 512 projections of 1024(2) pixels into a volume of size 512(3) voxels. The projections are acquired on a C-Arm scanner and directed in real time to a CBE-based platform for real-time reconstruction. The acquisition speed typically ranges between 17 and 35 projections per second. On a CBE processor clocked at 3.2 GHz, our implementation performs this task in similar to 13 seconds, allowing for real time reconstruction.