APRIL 17, 2008--MathStar (Hillsboro, OR, USA) has been selected by VisionGate (Gig Harbor, WA, USA) to develop a medical-imaging processor for cellular characterization employing 3-D computed-tomographic (CT) scanning on intact cells from patients at risk of cancer. VisionGate selected MathStar's Arrix FPOA chip as the processing engine for its Cell-CT platform, which is entering investigational clinical trials.
MathStar's FPOA will be used to implement the computationally demanding filtering and back-projection algorithms employed in 3-D imaging. By 2009, 256-slice CT machines will be widely deployed, with 512-slice machines on the horizon, offering the promise of clinically viable analysis of a beating heart.
In diagnostic ultrasound, archived volumetric data sets enable clinicians to overcome the inherent limitations of hand-held sonography by enabling postprocessed searches for desired 2-D views. Image analysis--for example, image registration to measure the before and after effects of a tumor drug therapy--presents some of the most computationally intensive, and algorithmically complex, challenges in medical diagnostics. Finally, the challenges of archiving data sets that are growing exponentially in size are now being addressed with computationally intense compression techniques such JPEG2000 and MPEG4/H.264.
For more information on the FPOAs use in medical imaging, go to www.mathstar.com/Medical.php.
