Real-time mutual-information-based linear registration on the cell broadband engine processor

Abstract

Emerging multi-core processors are able to accelerate medical imaging applications by exploiting the parallelism available in their algorithms. We have implemented a mutual-information-based 3D linear registration algorithm on the Cell Broadband Engine™ (CBE) processor, which has nine processor cores on a chip and has a 4-way SIMD unit for each core. By exploiting the highly parallel architecture and its high memory bandwidth, our implementation with two CBE processors can compute mutual information for about 33 million pixel pairs in a second. This implementation is significantly faster than a conventional one on a traditional microprocessor or even faster than a previously reported custom-hardware implementation. As a result, it can register a pair of 256×256×30 3D images in one second by using a multi-resolution method. This paper describes our implementation with a focus on localized sampling and speculative packing techniques, which reduce the amount of the memory traffic by 82%. © 2007 IEEE.