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Comparing performance of many‐core CPUs and GPUs for static and motion compensated reconstruction of C‐arm CT data
Author(s) -
Hofmann Hannes G.,
Keck Benjamin,
Rohkohl Christopher,
Hornegger Joachim
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
medical physics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.473
H-Index - 180
eISSN - 2473-4209
pISSN - 0094-2405
DOI - 10.1118/1.3525838
Subject(s) - computer science , iterative reconstruction , xeon , parallel computing , computational science , reconstruction algorithm , multi core processor , benchmark (surveying) , central processing unit , algorithm , computer vision , computer hardware , geodesy , geography
Purpose: Interventional reconstruction of 3‐D volumetric data from C‐arm CT projections is a computationally demanding task. Hardware optimization is not an option but mandatory for interventional image processing and, in particular, for image reconstruction due to the high demands on performance. Several groups have published fast analytical 3‐D reconstruction on highly parallel hardware such as GPUs to mitigate this issue. The authors show that the performance of modern CPU‐based systems is in the same order as current GPUs for static 3‐D reconstruction and outperforms them for a recent motion compensated ( 3 ‐ D + time )image reconstruction algorithm. Methods: This work investigates two algorithms: Static 3‐D reconstruction as well as a recent motion compensated algorithm. The evaluation was performed using a standardized reconstruction benchmark, R ABBIT CT, to get comparable results and two additional clinical data sets. Results: The authors demonstrate for a parametric B‐spline motion estimation scheme that the derivative computation, which requires many write operations to memory, performs poorly on the GPU and can highly benefit from modern CPU architectures with large caches. Moreover, on a 32‐core Intel® Xeon® server system, the authors achieve linear scaling with the number of cores used and reconstruction times almost in the same range as current GPUs. Conclusions: Algorithmic innovations in the field of motion compensated image reconstruction may lead to a shift back to CPUs in the future. For analytical 3‐D reconstruction, the authors show that the gap between GPUs and CPUs became smaller. It can be performed in less than 20 s (on‐the‐fly) using a 32‐core server.