Accelerating Fluid Registration Algorithm on Multi-FPGA Platforms

In the clinical applications, medical image registrations on the images taken from different times and/or through different modalities are needed in order to have an objective clinical assessment of the patient. Viscous fluid registration is a powerful PDE-based method that can register large deformations in the imaging process. This paper presents our implementation of the fluid registration algorithm on a multi-FPGA platform Convey HC-1. We obtain a 35X speedup versus single-threaded software on a CPU. The implementation is achieved using a high-level synthesis (HLS) tool, with additional source-code level optimizations including fixed-point conversion, tiling, prefetching, data-reuse, and streaming across modules using a ghost zone (time-tiling) approach. The experience of this case study also identifies further automation steps needed by existing HLS software.