Bachelor's thesis: Efficient Parallel Projectors for X-ray Computed Tomography

Thesis by: Erdal Pekel
Advisor: Bjoern Menze
Supervision by: Tobias Lasser

Abstract

X-Ray Computed Tomography (CT) is one of the cornerstones of medical imaging for many decades now. The tomographic reconstruction of CT is quite well understood theoretically and practically, but many open research issues remain. A central point for any reconstruction method is the projector and back-projector pair, which models the interaction process of X-rays with matter, the detection process in the detector and the acquisition geometry. Several standard methods for this are described in the literature, each with specific advantages and disadvantages. Common to all these methods are high computational requirements, necessitating the use of parallel computing.

Tasks

The aim of this Bachelor's thesis is the educated selection of a suitable cone-beam projection / back-projection method based on established literature, and its efficient implementation in our existing C++ framework for tomographic reconstruction, CAMPRecon, using a parallel implementation on CPUs, with an exploration of the capabilities of Xeon Phi accelerators. The results should be tested and evaluated both on simulated and real clinical data (in cooperation with our partners at the university clinic MRI).

Requirements

C++ programming skills.