Use of transputers in a 3-D positron emission tomograph

M.S. Atkins, D. Murray, R. Harrop
1991 IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging  
The use of a VME-based transputer network as a parallel processing engine for positron volume imaging is discussed. We find that the speedups of parallel networks depend on two major factors: the ratio of computation to communication for a task, and the size of the task, and we give a simple model to explore the limits to speedups. Through actual implementation we show that real-time PVI data acquisition can be achieved with about 20 transputer nodes, and we estimate that 3-D image
more » ... n can be achieved within 10 min using 200 nodes. Larger images and a larger number of histograms can readily be accommodated using the same parallel algorithms as our model places no limits to the size of the images. The versatility and scalability of transputers makes them very suitable for use in PVI tomographs in that the same transputers can be used for speeding up data acquisition, image reconstruction, and display. 0278-0062/91$01 00 i c~ I991 IEEE Authorized licensed use limited to: SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY. Downloaded on March 13,2010 at 15:42:14 EST from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
doi:10.1109/42.97576 pmid:18222828 fatcat:2ito3bh2qjd4ll2eqrxrwb324i