TY - GEN
T1 - A fast and high-quality cone beam reconstruction pipeline using the GPU
AU - Schiwietz, Thomas
AU - Bose, Supratik
AU - Maltz, Jonathan
AU - Westermann, Rüdiger
PY - 2007
Y1 - 2007
N2 - Cone beam scanners have evolved rapidly in the past years. Increasing sampling resolution of the projection images and the desire to reconstruct high resolution output volumes increases both the memory consumption and the processing time considerably. In order to keep the processing time down new strategies for memory management are required as well as new algorithmic implementations of the reconstruction pipeline. In this paper, we present a fast and high-quality cone beam reconstruction pipeline using the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). This pipeline includes the backprojection process and also pre-filtering and post-filtering stages. In particular, we focus on a subset of five stages, but more stages can be integrated easily. In the pre-filtering stage, we first reduce the amount of noise in the acquired projection images by a non-linear curvature-based smoothing algorithm. Then, we apply a high-pass filter as required by the inverse Radon transform. Next, the backprojection pass reconstructs a raw 3D volume. In post-processing, we first filter the volume by a ring artifact removal. Then, we remove cupping artifacts by our novel uniformity correction algorithm. We present the algorithm in detail. In order to execute the pipeline as quickly as possible we take advantage of GPUs that have proven to be very fast parallel processors for numerical problems. Unfortunately, both the projection images and the reconstruction volume are too large to fit into 512 MB of GPU memory. Therefore, we present an efficient memory management strategy that minimizes the bus transfer between main memory and GPU memory. Our results show a 4 times performance gain over a highly optimized CPU implementation using SSE2/3 commands. At the same time, the image quality is comparable to the CPU results with an average per pixel difference of 10-5.
AB - Cone beam scanners have evolved rapidly in the past years. Increasing sampling resolution of the projection images and the desire to reconstruct high resolution output volumes increases both the memory consumption and the processing time considerably. In order to keep the processing time down new strategies for memory management are required as well as new algorithmic implementations of the reconstruction pipeline. In this paper, we present a fast and high-quality cone beam reconstruction pipeline using the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). This pipeline includes the backprojection process and also pre-filtering and post-filtering stages. In particular, we focus on a subset of five stages, but more stages can be integrated easily. In the pre-filtering stage, we first reduce the amount of noise in the acquired projection images by a non-linear curvature-based smoothing algorithm. Then, we apply a high-pass filter as required by the inverse Radon transform. Next, the backprojection pass reconstructs a raw 3D volume. In post-processing, we first filter the volume by a ring artifact removal. Then, we remove cupping artifacts by our novel uniformity correction algorithm. We present the algorithm in detail. In order to execute the pipeline as quickly as possible we take advantage of GPUs that have proven to be very fast parallel processors for numerical problems. Unfortunately, both the projection images and the reconstruction volume are too large to fit into 512 MB of GPU memory. Therefore, we present an efficient memory management strategy that minimizes the bus transfer between main memory and GPU memory. Our results show a 4 times performance gain over a highly optimized CPU implementation using SSE2/3 commands. At the same time, the image quality is comparable to the CPU results with an average per pixel difference of 10-5.
KW - Cone beam reconstruction
KW - Cupping artifact removal
KW - Curvature smoothing
KW - FFT
KW - Filtered backprojection
KW - GPU
KW - High-pass filter-ing
KW - Ring artifact removal
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=35148861247&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1117/12.707598
DO - 10.1117/12.707598
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:35148861247
SN - 081946628X
SN - 9780819466280
T3 - Progress in Biomedical Optics and Imaging - Proceedings of SPIE
BT - Medical Imaging 2007
T2 - Medical Imaging 2007: Physics of Medical Imaging
Y2 - 18 February 2007 through 22 February 2007
ER -