Hardware-accelerated cone-beam reconstruction on a mobile C-arm

The three-dimensional image reconstruction process used in interventional CT imaging is computationally demanding. Implementation on general-purpose computational platforms requires a substantial time, which is undesirable during time-critical surgical and minimally invasive procedures. Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA)s and Graphics Processing Units (GPU)s have been studied as a platform to accelerate 3-D imaging. FPGA and GPU devices offer a reprogrammable hardware architecture, configurable for pipelining and high levels of parallel processing to increase computational throughput, as well as the benefits of being off-the-shelf and effective 'performance-to-watt' solutions. The main focus of this paper is on the backprojection step of the image reconstruction process, since it is the most computationally intensive part. Using the popular Feldkamp-Davis-Kress (FDK) cone-beam algorithm, our studies indicate the entire 2563 image reconstruction process can be accelerated to real or near real-time (i.e. immediately after a finished scan of 15-30 seconds duration) on a mobile X-ray C-arm system using available resources on built-in FPGA board. High resolution 5123 image backprojection can be also accomplished within the same scanning time on a highend GPU board comprising up to 128 streaming processors.