Volume reconstruction
SnapCT is the new Digisens acceleration plugin using graphic card power
SnapCT is the beginning of a new era of snap reconstruction
  • Reconstruction time is 10 to 50 times faster
  • Reduce your budget by 3
  • Use evolutive Giga Thread © NVidia mass market products to stay on the cutting edge of frequent hardware evolutions
  • Use high precision and high quality 32/64 bits algorithms
  • Support images of any size and ratio up to 64 Mega pixels
  • Reconstruct any size and shape up to 1 Tera voxels

SnapCT opens the door to instantaneous tomography

September 2007,
Over the last few years the power of consumer graphics cards has grown dramatically, much more rapidly than the power of the processors. Today the applications for these cards extends far beyond video games. This was demonstrated by the launching in July of SnapCT’s first version, tomographic reconstruction software from Digisens which, allows using the GPU processing capabilities.

Graphics processors reveal their superiority when the calculations are carried out massively in parallel. From their vast experience in the tomographic reconstruction world, Digisens has seized this opportunity to work on a GPU version of its algorithm.

The SnapCT code has been totally rewritten to take advantage of these accelerations. So far the preliminary results have demonstrated a time savings factor from 20 to 50 times. This phenomenal acceleration is not SnapCT’s only advantage. The computers are also more affordable, with the hardware costs being divided by a factor of three.

Finally, the cards can be placed in parallel to further reduce the processing time. Two cards can be placed in a standard computer, or even more in the Tesla nVidia solutions.

Performances and test conditions

Volume X-Ray
resolution		 DigiCT CPU SnapCT CPU/GPU Ratio Concurrent
FPGA Technology
Using a dedicated card		 Concurrent
FPGA Technology
Using 2 dedicated cards
512³ 512² 3'35" 12" 18 38" 19"
1024³ 512² 28'06" 1'11" 24 na na
2048³ 512² 3h50'50" 8'32" 27 na na
512³ 1024² 4'19" 24" 11 52" 26"
1024³ 1024² 1h07'09" 1'33" 20 5'48" 2'54"

The tests were carried out on an Intel QuadCore platform turning at 2.66Ghz with an nVidia GeForce 8800 GTX Ultra graphics card. The input data as well as the reconstructed volumes are in a 32 bit format. The data processed includes 360 X-Rays with a 512x512 pixels resolution. The times given include all the reconstruction operations: from the image loading, their filtering, as well as the retro-projection and the recording of the volume on the hard disk. With a single graphics card, SnapCT reconstructs a volume of 512³ in 12 seconds and in a little more than a minute and a half for 1024³. In comparison, the best graphic cards that are specifically manufactured for tomographic reconstruction give results of 38 seconds for a 512³: The dedicated cards are 4 times slower. SnapCT renders this extremely expensive type of specific solution obsolete.

 

  • DigiCT on Dual Intel Duo Core 2.3 GHz *
  • DigiCT v2 *
  • Embedded software
    with dedicated FPGA hardware (one board)
  • Embedded software
    with dedicated FPGA hardware (two boards)
  • SnapCT * with a single board
  • SnapCT * with a two-board solution
 SnapCT volume reconstruction at 512
  • DigiCT on Dual Intel Duo Core 2.3 GHz *
  • DigiCT v2 *
  • Embedded software
    with dedicated FPGA hardware (one board)
  • Embedded software
    with dedicated FPGA hardware (two boards)
  • SnapCT * with a single board
  • SnapCT * with a two-board solution
 SnapCT volume reconstruction at 1024
 

* Total reconstruction time = all the reconstruction operations from the image loading to the recording of the volume on the hard disk divided by 360 (numbers of images).