Virtual Imaging Center

For medical implementation of high performance computing (HPC) in neuroinformatics, CDS's strategy begins with GeoMedica's design of informatic medical devices, such as dEEG systems with a software architecture that allows insertion of HPC in the data stream.

 

Remote Computing Support for Point of Care

The virtual imaging center of the future will involve remote databases and pattern classification at CDS's HPC facilities, linked to hospitals, clinics, and homes through the Internet.

 

 

 

 

 

Bedside High-Performance Computing

However, for many neuroinformatics tasks HPC must also be provided at the point of care. CDS and NIC scientists are developing inexpensive HPC strategies that are based on commodity technologies, including the IBM Cell processor and general purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU) designs.

 

 

In this example, the head conductivity estimation problem was ported to the architecture of the Cell Broadband Engine (in the Sony PlayStation 3). The graph at right shows the speedup of the problem with the number of processors dedicated to the job. The Cell performance in blue and that of the IBM p690 in red.

 

 

With this highly parallel implementation, the performance of one of the three clusters on the Iconic Grid ($1.1 million each from IBM) can be matched by approximately 10 Cells ($425 each for PlayStation 3 from Target). In CDS's design for the virtual imaging center, inexpensive HPC clusters in medical laboratories and homes will provide local high-performance pre-processing resources that then link the compact, processed data to database and clinical decision tools at CDS facilities.

 

Computing for Individualized Medicine

With advanced algorithms that are optimized for high-performance computing, automatic processing of MR and EEG data will provide increasingly powerful tools for basic and clinical neuroscience.

 

 

Here the individual's cortical surface was extracted from the structural MR image (right), and tessellated with dipoles at each patch of cortex (below). 

With high-performance computing now increasingly affordable, CDS plans to bring individualized services, such as  cortical-surface dEEG source estimation, at reasonable cost to all advanced neuroscience centers.