Forward-Projection Architecture for Fast Iterative Image Reconstruction in X-Ray CT

Iterative image reconstruction can dramatically improve the image quality in X-ray computed tomography (CT), but the computation involves iterative steps of 3D forward- and back-projection, which impedes routine clinical use. To accelerate forward-projection, we analyze the CT geometry to identify the intrinsic parallelism and data access sequence for a highly parallel hardware architecture. To improve the efficiency of this architecture, we propose a water-filling buffer to remove pipeline stalls, and an out-of-order sectored processing to reduce the off-chip memory access by up to three orders of magnitude. We make a floating-point to fixed-point conversion based on numerical simulations and demonstrate comparable image quality at a much lower implementation cost. As a proof of concept, a 5-stage fully pipelined, 55-way parallel separable-footprint forward-projector is prototyped on a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA for a throughput of 925.8 million voxel projections/s at 200 MHz clock frequency, 4.6 times higher than an optimized 16-threaded program running on an 8-core 2.8-GHz CPU. A similar architecture can be applied to back-projection for a complete iterative image reconstruction system. The proposed algorithm and architecture can also be applied to hardware platforms such as graphics processing unit and digital signal processor to achieve significant accelerations.