Safe and rapid functional brain imaging with transcranial photoacoustic tomography: Accelerating iterative image reconstruction algorithms using GPUs

Mark Anastasio, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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Neuroimaging technologies are playing an increasingly important role in the initial detection and subsequent monitoring of a wide range of brain diseases and injuries in children. Such applications include detection and management of traumatic brain injury and tumors, the assessment of stroke risk in children with sickle cell disease, and imaging the preterm children brain, to name only a few. In this project, Dr. Anastasio’s research group will address the computational challenges of a 3D photoacoustic computed tomography (PACT) neuroimaging modality that has the promise to provide high-resolution, safe and rapid functional brain imaging. The image reconstruction problem in 3D PACT is solved iteratively using an optimization- based image reconstruction algorithm that is developed based on the elastic wave equation. To accomplish this, the Computational Imaging Science Lab developed a massively parallel multi-GPUs implementation of a forward-adjoint operator pair based on a finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) discretization of the elastic wave equation using the NVIDIA’s CUDA framework and the message passing interface MPI. Access to Blue Waters resources will allow the team to perform 3D PACT reconstructions with extremely fine resolutions, up to billions of voxels.