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Browsing by Author "Zeng, Kai"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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    A Fast CT Reconstruction Scheme for a General Multi-Core PC
    Zeng, Kai; Bai, Erwei; Wang, Ge (Hindawi, 2007-07-04)
    Expensive computational cost is a severe limitation in CT reconstruction for clinical applications that need real-time feedback. A primary example is bolus-chasing computed tomography (CT) angiography (BCA) that we have been developing for the past several years. To accelerate the reconstruction process using the filtered backprojection (FBP) method, specialized hardware or graphics cards can be used. However, specialized hardware is expensive and not flexible. The graphics processing unit (GPU) in a current graphic card can only reconstruct images in a reduced precision and is not easy to program. In this paper, an acceleration scheme is proposed based on a multi-core PC. In the proposed scheme, several techniques are integrated, including utilization of geometric symmetry, optimization of data structures, single-instruction multiple-data (SIMD) processing, multithreaded computation, and an Intel C++ compilier. Our scheme maintains the original precision and involves no data exchange between the GPU and CPU. The merits of our scheme are demonstrated in numerical experiments against the traditional implementation. Our scheme achieves a speedup of about 40, which can be further improved by several folds using the latest quad-core processors.
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    How to Define the Next Generation Cardiac CT Architecture? - a Contemporary Challenge for Interdisciplinary Collaboration
    Yu, Hengyong; DeMan, Bruno; Carr, Jeff; Frontera, Mark; Zeng, Kai; Bennett, James; Fitzgerald, Paul; Iatrou, Maria; Shen, Haiou; Santago, Peter; Wang, Ge (2010-05-21)
    Cardiovascular diseases are pervasive with high mortality and morbidity at tremendous social and healthcare costs. There are urgent needs for significantly higher fidelity cardiac CT with substantially lower radiation dose, which is currently not possible because of technical limitations. Although cardiac CT technology has improved significantly from 16 to 320 detector rows and from single to dual source, there remain technical challenges in terms of temporal resolution, spatial resolution, radiation dose, and so on. Based on an ideal academic-industrial partnership between Virginia Tech and the GE Global Research Center (GEGR), we are motivated to advance the state-of-the-art in cardiac CT. The overall goal of this project is to develop novel cardiac CT architectures and the associated reconstruction algorithms, and define the next-generation cardiac CT system. The specific aims are to (1) design, analyze and compare novel cardiac CT architectures with novel sources and scanning trajectories; (2) develop analytic and iterative cardiac CT reconstruction algorithms for ROI-oriented scanning and dynamic imaging for the proposed cardiac CT architectures; and (3) evaluate and validate the proposed architectures and algorithms in theoretical studies, numerical simulations, phantom experiments and observer studies. On completion of this project, we will have singled out the most promising cardiac CT architectures and algorithms to achieve 16cm coverage, 50ms temporal resolution, 20lp/cm spatial resolution, 10HU noise level, and 1mSv effective dose simultaneously for the entire examination, with detailed specifications and performance evaluation, setting the stage for prototyping a next-generation cardiac CT system in a Phase-II project. This project will enable significantly better diagnostic performance and bring major therapeutic benefits that affect over 60 million Americans.