3-D brain MRI tissue classification on FPGAs.

Many automatic algorithms have been proposed for analyzing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data sets. With the increasingly large data sets being used in brain mapping, there has been a significant rise in the need for accelerating these algorithms. Partial volume estimation (PVE), a brain tissue classification algorithm for MRI, was implemented on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based high performance reconfigurable computer using the Mitrion-C high-level language (HLL). This work develops on prior work in which we conducted initial studies on accelerating the prior information estimation algorithm. In this paper, we extend the work to include probability density estimation and present new results and additional analysis. We used several simulated and real human brain MR images to evaluate the accuracy and performance improvement of the proposed algorithm. The FPGA-based probability density estimation and prior information estimation implementation achieved an average speedup over an Itanium 2 CPU of 2.5 x and 9.4 x , respectively. The overall performance improvement of the FPGA-based PVE algorithm was 5.1 x with four FPGAs.