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Accelerated multidimensional radiofrequency pulse design for parallel transmission using concurrent computation on multiple graphics processing units
Author(s) -
Deng Weiran,
Yang Cungeng,
Stenger V. Andrew
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
magnetic resonance in medicine
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.696
H-Index - 225
eISSN - 1522-2594
pISSN - 0740-3194
DOI - 10.1002/mrm.22690
Subject(s) - computer science , parallel communication , computation , acceleration , graphics , dwell time , graphics processing unit , computer graphics , spiral (railway) , transmission (telecommunications) , computational science , radio frequency , field (mathematics) , pulse (music) , algorithm , computer graphics (images) , parallel computing , physics , telecommunications , detector , medicine , clinical psychology , mathematical analysis , mathematics , classical mechanics , pure mathematics
Multidimensional radiofrequency (RF) pulses are of current interest because of their promise for improving high‐field imaging and for optimizing parallel transmission methods. One major drawback is that the computation time of numerically designed multidimensional RF pulses increases rapidly with their resolution and number of transmitters. This is critical because the construction of multidimensional RF pulses often needs to be in real time. The use of graphics processing units for computations is a recent approach for accelerating image reconstruction applications. We propose the use of graphics processing units for the design of multidimensional RF pulses including the utilization of parallel transmitters. Using a desktop computer with four NVIDIA Tesla C1060 computing processors, we found acceleration factors on the order of 20 for standard eight‐transmitter two‐dimensional spiral RF pulses with a 64 × 64 excitation resolution and a 10‐μsec dwell time. We also show that even greater acceleration factors can be achieved for more complex RF pulses. Magn Reson Med, 2011. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.