"Standard CT scanners can generate images of patient's body in less than five minutes today, but the radiation dose can be equal to about 70 chest X-rays. Lower-powered CT scans can be used in non-emergency situations, but it can take more than four days to produce those images. Intel and GE created an algorithm that speeds up a computer's ability to process the low radiation dose scans by 100x, from 100 hours per image to one hour."
http://freepress.intel.com/community/news/blog/2012/03/12/computing-power-speeds-safer-ct-scans
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/03/12/199244/algorithm-brings-speedier-safer-ct-scans
I definitely like this as I get CT scans at least once a year. We try to keep aware of my exposure to radiation, and we definitely prefer MRI's to CT scans, so this is a great step in the right direction.GE calls the technology Veo, so that's what to ask for when you're told you need a CT scan.
From the article:
As Baker described the breakthrough, "The joint team ultimately developed an accelerator based on 28 Xeon processors totaling 112 cores and a dramatically improved algorithm. We reduced the compute time to around an hour, delivering superior medical images and reducing the X-ray power by up to 90 percent."
As I was reading through some of the Slashdot comments, I came across a post that said this had already been done by some scientists using the graphics processors in video games such as the Sony Play Station. I'm not really an expert on the processing power of console game units, but I understand it's pretty incredible. A couple of years ago the U.S. Air Force bought something like 1,700 Playstation 2's to rig together to form a small supercomputer for the Academy, and this has become a fairly common technique for filling the need for inexpensive supercomputing requirements: they may not be as fast as a dedicated mainframe or supercomputer, but they're tremendously faster than a PC or PC network.
http://phys.org/news198934846.html
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