Graphics cards help advance medical imaging

PC graphics cards have long been touted as the cutting edge in terms of videogame visuals. But according to British engineering site The Engineer Online, they also could serve another purpose: the medical field.

In a study by King’s College London and the University College London to see how they can make faster magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines, researchers found that current cost-effective MRI machines take too long to process images of patients’ cardiac and respiratory motion.

In 2006, the researchers found they could do image reconstruction faster via a cluster of networked 64-bit supercomputer, which costs £15,000 (approximately US$30,000). However, they found a far more cost-effective way to speed it up when they used PCs armed with the newest graphics cards, which, by contrast, cost £500 ($1,000) in the United Kingdom.

UCL’s Dr. David Atkinson told The Engineer Online he believes the video boards do the trick quite nicely:

The reconstruction of data into an image has historically been time-consuming and for some schemes, it takes longer than the acquisition itself. By using graphics cards, we have been able to get the image reconstruction time down to less than the acquisition time.

KCL Professor Tobias Schaeffter attributes the graphics cards’ abilities directly to the game industry and told the site as much as well:

If you look at the graphics card, each year a new one comes out, these have something like 128 processors. The reason for this is the games industry. It is amazing how much the power of the cards increases annually by putting on more processors and more memory.

Kind of nice to hear that the game industry is helping people every now and again, contrary to prevailing media opinion.

Read [The Engineer Online] Also Read [Joystiq]