Accelerating statistical image reconstruction algorithms for fan-beam x-ray CT using cloud computing

Somesh Srivastava; A. Ravishankar Rao; Vadim Sheinin

doi:10.1117/12.877877

3 March 2011 Accelerating statistical image reconstruction algorithms for fan-beam x-ray CT using cloud computing

Somesh Srivastava, A. Ravishankar Rao, Vadim Sheinin

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 7961, Medical Imaging 2011: Physics of Medical Imaging; 796134 (2011) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.877877
Event: SPIE Medical Imaging, 2011, Lake Buena Vista (Orlando), Florida, United States

Abstract

Statistical image reconstruction algorithms potentially offer many advantages to x-ray computed tomography (CT), e.g. lower radiation dose. But, their adoption in practical CT scanners requires extra computation power, which is traditionally provided by incorporating additional computing hardware (e.g. CPU-clusters, GPUs, FPGAs etc.) into a scanner. An alternative solution is to access the required computation power over the internet from a cloud computing service, which is orders-of-magnitude more cost-effective. This is because users only pay a small pay-as-you-go fee for the computation resources used (i.e. CPU time, storage etc.), and completely avoid purchase, maintenance and upgrade costs. In this paper, we investigate the benefits and shortcomings of using cloud computing for statistical image reconstruction. We parallelized the most time-consuming parts of our application, the forward and back projectors, using MapReduce, the standard parallelization library on clouds. From preliminary investigations, we found that a large speedup is possible at a very low cost. But, communication overheads inside MapReduce can limit the maximum speedup, and a better MapReduce implementation might become necessary in the future. All the experiments for this paper, including development and testing, were completed on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for less than $20.

Citation Download Citation

Somesh Srivastava, A. Ravishankar Rao, and Vadim Sheinin "Accelerating statistical image reconstruction algorithms for fan-beam x-ray CT using cloud computing", Proc. SPIE 7961, Medical Imaging 2011: Physics of Medical Imaging, 796134 (3 March 2011); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.877877

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