Maximum likelihood SPECT in clinical computation times using mesh-connected parallel computers

• Published in: IEEE transactions on medical imaging Vol. 10; no. 3; pp. 426 - 436
• Main Authors: McCarthy, A.W., Miller, M.I.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY IEEE 01.09.1991; Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Subjects: Attenuation; Biological and medical sciences; Computed tomography; Concurrent computing; Detectors; Image reconstruction; Investigative techniques, diagnostic techniques (general aspects); Iterative algorithms; Maximum likelihood detection; Maximum likelihood estimation; Medical sciences; Positron emission tomography; Reconstruction algorithms; Instrumentation; Mathematical model; Positron emission tomography; Computerized processing; Biomedical engineering
• ISSN: 0278-0062
• DOI: 10.1109/42.97593

Extending the work of A.W. McCarthy et al. (1988) and M.I. Miller and B. Roysam (1991), the authors demonstrate that a fully parallel implementation of the maximum-likelihood method for single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) can be accomplished in clinical time frames on massively parallel systolic array processors. The authors show that for SPECT imaging on 64*64 image grids, with 96 view angles, the single-instruction, multiple data (SIMD) distributed array processor containing 64/sup 2/ processors performs the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm with Good's smoothing at a rate of 1 iteration/1.5 s. This promises for emission tomography fully Bayesian reconstructions including regularization in clinical computation times which are on the order of 1 min/slice. The most important result of the implementations is that the scaling rules for computation times are roughly linear in the number of processors.< >