title: Accelerating image reconstruction in dual-head PET system by GPU and symmetry properties.
abstract: Positron emission tomography (PET) is an important imaging modality in both clinical usage and research studies. We have developed a compact high-sensitivity PET system that consisted of two large-area panel PET detector heads, which produce more than 224 million lines of response and thus request dramatic computational demands. In this work, we employed a state-of-the-art graphics processing unit (GPU), NVIDIA Tesla C2070, to yield an efficient reconstruction process. Our approaches ingeniously integrate the distinguished features of the symmetry properties of the imaging system and GPU architectures, including block/warp/thread assignments and effective memory usage, to accelerate the computations for ordered subset expectation maximization (OSEM) image reconstruction. The OSEM reconstruction algorithms were implemented employing both CPU-based and GPU-based codes, and their computational performance was quantitatively analyzed and compared. The results showed that the GPU-accelerated scheme can drastically reduce the reconstruction time and thus can largely expand the applicability of the dual-head PET system.
authors.affiliation: Department of Bio-Industrial Mechatronics Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Cheng-Ying
authors.initials: CY
authors.lastname: Chou
authors.forename: Yun
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Dong
authors.forename: Yukai
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Hung
authors.forename: Yu-Jiun
authors.initials: YJ
authors.lastname: Kao
authors.forename: Weichung
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Chien-Min
authors.initials: CM
authors.lastname: Kao
authors.forename: Chin-Tu
authors.initials: CT
authors.lastname: Chen
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D003196:Computer Graphics; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D049268:Positron-Emission Tomography / Q000379:methods*; D012984:Software