On-the-fly-Reconstruction in Exact Cone-Beam CT using the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture

In medical imaging a high image quality is required. Exact cone-beam reconstruction algorithms, e.g. the Mline method, provide excellent image quality without any cone artifacts. Although the M-line approach is still of a filtered backprojection style, it has an increased computational complexity as it requires additional computations for the filtering of the projection images, e.g. derivative computation and filtering along oblique lines in the projection. In order to enable this new reconstruction methodology in standard clinical scenarios we implemented a highly performance optimized version on the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture (CBEA). Our software framework allows to compute the filtering and back-projection in parallel to the data acquisition, making it possible to do an on-the-fly-reconstruction. The achieved results demonstrate that M-line reconstructions with our optimized Cell-based implementation are finished immediately after the last projection image has been acquired by the scanning device.