Accelerated cone beam CT reconstruction based on OpenCL

Open Computing Language (OpenCL) is a fundamental technology for cross-platform parallel programming. The emerging of OpenCL provides portable and efficient access to the power of modern processors. This revolutionary new technology is applied to accelerate the reconstruction of cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) on Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) in this paper. An OpenCL-based implementation of the Feldkamp-Davis-Kress (FDK) algorithm is presented. The required transformations to parallelize the algorithm for the OpenCL architecture are also explained. Comparing to the conventional CPU-based implementation, the proposed method reaches an over 57 times speedup. Experimental results show a great performance boost, which can pave the way for widespread application and new conceptual innovation of CBCT. Besides, the feasibility and potential of OpenCL-based implementation are also indicated.