A novel optimized parallelization strategy to accelerate microwave tomography for breast cancer screening

Microwave tomography has been proven to successfully reconstruct the dielectric profile of a human breast when used in breast imaging applications, thereby providing an alternative to other imaging modalities. However, the method suffers from high computational requirements which restrict its use in practical imaging systems. This paper presents a novel parallelization strategy to accelerate microwave tomography for reconstruction of the dielectric properties of the human breast. A Time Domain algorithm using this parallelization strategy has been validated and benchmarked against an optimized sequential implementation on a conventional high-end desktop Central Processing Unit (CPU), and a comparison of throughput is presented in this paper. The gain in computational throughput is shown to be significantly higher compared with the sequential implementation, ranging from a factor of 26 to 58, on imaging grid sizes of up to 25 cm square at 1mm resolution.