Fast volume reconstruction in positron emission tomography: implementation of four algorithms on a high-performance scalable parallel platform

The issue of long reconstruction times in PET has been addressed from several points of view, resulting in an affordable dedicated system capable of handling routine 3D reconstruction in a few minutes per frame: on the hardware side using fast processors and a parallel architecture, and on the software side, using efficient implementations of computationally less intensive algorithms. Execution times obtained for the PRT-1 data set on a parallel system of five hybrid nodes, each combining an Alpha processor for computation and a transputer for communication, are the following (256 sinograms of 96 views by 128 radial samples): Ramp algorithm 56 s, Favor 81 s and reprojection algorithm of Kinahan and Rogers (1990) 187 s. The implementation of fast rebinning algorithms has shown the authors' hardware platform to become communications-limited; they execute faster on a conventional single-processor Alpha workstation: single-slice rebinning 7 s, Fourier rebinning 22 s, 2D filtered backprojection 5 s. The scalability of the system has been demonstrated, and a saturation effect at network sizes above ten nodes has become visible; new T9000-based products lifting most of the constraints on network topology and link throughput are expected to result in improved parallel efficiency and scalability properties.