Parallelization of Iterative Reconstruction Algorithms in Multiple Modalities.

In this work we have parallelized the Maximum Likelihood Expectation-Maximization (MLEM) and Ordered Subset Expectation Maximization (OSEM) algorithms for improving efficiency of reconstructions of multiple pinholes SPECT, and cone-bean CT data. We implemented the parallelized versions of the algorithms on a General Purpose Graphic Processing Unit (GPGPU): 448 cores of a NVIDIA Tesla M2070 GPU with 6GB RAM per thread of computing. We compared their run times against those from the corresponding CPU implementations running on 8 cores CPU of an AMD Opteron 6128 with 32 GB RAM. We have further shown how an optimization of thread balancing can accelerate the speed of the GPU implementation.