C-to-FPGA for Tomographic Reconstruction

Nikhil Subramanian*, Jimmy Xu*, Adam Alessio**, Scott Hauck*

**Imaging Research Lab (IRL), Radiology, University of Washington; *Adaptive Computing Machines and Emulators (ACME) Lab, Electrical Engineering, University of Washington

INTRODUCTION

Tomographic reconstruction is the process of creating cross-sectional images from emission or transmission data acquired by a scanner. Apart from medical imaging applications in X-Ray CT and PET, these principles apply to a variety of other domains ranging from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to electron microscopy. As a result, there has been considerable interest in evolving efficient and accelerated techniques to perform the reconstruction.

In tomographic systems, the primary computational demand after data capture by the scanner is the backprojection of the acquired data into image space to reconstruct the internal structure of the scanned object (Figure 1 middle). Back-projection can be viewed as a mapping of raw data space into the image space. In a typical parallel-beam CT system, the data has ~10⁶ entries for each cross-section and the image has ~2x10⁵ entries. The process of tracing each datum through the image space is demanding. The key to accelerating the process is exploiting parallelism in the computation which is often accomplished by implementing the algorithm in reconfigurable computing platforms.

Figure 1. Simplified Tomography flow. Scanning (left) produces a set of aggregate data on probe lines. Through back-projection (center) multiple samples are brought together to reconstruct the internal structure of the patient (right).

In this project we developed an FPGA accelerator to speedup backprojection. We created the FPGA design using a C-to-FPGA tool flow called Impulse C with a view to compare the performance of this high level tool flow with that of traditional based design flows. For information about the implemented C-to-FPGA and HDL design please see the publications section below. For the Impulse-C source-code and design please see the design files section.

Publications

Student Theses

N. Subramanian, A C-to-FPGA Solution for Accelerating Tomographic Reconstruction, M.S. Thesis, University of Washington, Dept. of EE, 2009

Design Files

Click Here to download the Impulse C design files. This design performs the back projection of a 512x512 image from 1024 projections having 1024 detector channels each.