The PS3 can see inside you

Mike Bantick
Tuesday, 10 April 2007 04:38

Your IT - Entertainment

The PlayStation 3 has a heart of Cell/B E processors.  Medical scientists at the Mayo Clinic are now using this processor to create 3D images of patient's hearts, and other internals.

So it may not currently be selling great on the home front, but maybe there is an alternate future for the PS3 in medical science.  Already the folding@home calculations, needed to solve some of man-kind's most insidious afflictions are mostly being powered by Internet connected PS3's.

The Mayo Clinic, and IBM have shown that using two medical images obtained at different dates or by using different imaging devices, in three-dimensional space. With the images properly aligned over one another, a radiologist can more easily detect structural changes such as the growth or shrinkage of tumors.

Previously calculated using an optimised IBM BladeCenter QS20 'Cell Blade' results were obtained 50 times faster than the previous traditional processor set-up. 

"This alignment of images both improves the accuracy of interpretation and improves radiologist efficiency, particularly for diseases like cancer," says Mayo radiology researcher Bradley Erickson, M.D., Ph.D.

The 3-D linear algorithm finds the best spatial positioning to maximize the amount of information gathered from the two images, thereby optimizing sampling quality while reducing sampling time. Greater efficiencies were achieved by caching data in cuboids or "bricks" so image sampling did not "waste" pixels. When sampling ratio was comparatively low, the team packed the sampled moving pixel images in a contiguous fashion (in an "image stripe") to speed retrieval when needed.
By running the application faster, a physician will be able to make a quicker diagnosis and promptly begin appropriate treatments for patients.

"This is all about taking technology innovation, collaborating with our customers, and applying it to help them directly benefit their patients," said Shahrokh Daijavad, Next Generation Computing, Systems & Technology, IBM. "This improvement with the application running on Cell, will achieve two things -- allow for Mayo's doctors and radiologists to achieve in seconds what used to take hours, which in turn will significantly decrease the wait time and anxiety for a patient waiting on news from the doctor."

The results will be presented in full in a joint presentation by Mayo Clinic and IBM at the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging in Washington, D.C., April 12-15.