Multi-GPU Distributed Magnetic Resonance Image Reconstruction Based on Gadgetron

Abstract

Clinical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanning requires fast image reconstruction. At present, most image reconstruction algorithms are implemented with central processing unit (CPU)-based processing. However, with massive amount of raw data and increasing complexity of the algorithm, CPU-based processing can be inefficient due to lack of computation parallelism and slow computation speed. For this reason, some advanced algorithms are difficult to implement in clinical practice. In this paper, a new image reconstruction algorithm was designed and implemented, which combined multiple cores CPU with multi-graphic processing unit (GPU) to reconstruct magnetic resonance images by distributed parallel computing on the Gadgetron software platform. Taking the Stack of Star (SOS) reconstruction as an example, it was demonstrated that the proposed method improved the reconstruction speed significantly without the requirement of expensive hardware.

Keywords

• magnetic resonance image reconstruction
• Gadgetron
• multi-GPU
• distributed parallel computing
• 3D MRI