A hybrid hardware accelerated approach for tomographic reconstruction

Cost effective reconstruction of tomographic images via off-the-shelf components is becoming more feasible as both processors and graphic card hardware continue to increase in capability and overall processing speed. We describe a hybrid CPU/graphic card approach for reconstructing CT images for fan-beam and cone-beam acquisitions. Our optimized algorithms produce results that further improve the performance of hardware accelerated approaches for image reconstruction using low-end Intel Pentium IV systems configured with commonly available low to medium end graphic cards. This paper includes a full description of our approach and a numerical performance study of the described algorithms utilizing several commonly available off-the-shelf graphics hardware boards.