Accelerating DTI tractography using FPGAs

Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) tractography in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a computationally intensive procedure, requiring on the order of tens of minutes to complete tractography of the entire brain. Tractography computations can be accelerated significantly by the use of reconfigurable hardware, such as field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Such acceleration has the potential to lead to real-time tractography, which would greatly facilitate on-site diagnosis and acquisition of additional scans while the patient is still inside the scanner. In this paper, we report the development of an FPGA based architecture to accelerate DTI tractography. We identify computationally intensive kernels and design pipelined implementations. Our performance analysis based on the developed architecture gives on the order of 100times speed-up over an optimized implementation in C of tractography on a state-of-the-art processor