Quantitative sodium magnetic resonance imaging permits noninvasive
measurement of the tissue sodium concentration (TSC) bioscale in the
brain. Computing the TSC bioscale requires reconstructing and combining
multiple datasets acquired with a non-Cartesian acquisition that highly
oversamples the center of k-space. Even with an optimized
implementation of the algorithm to compute TSC, the overall processing
time exceeds the time required to collect data from the human subject.
Such a mismatch presents a challenge for sustained sodium imaging to
avoid a growing data backlog and provide timely results. The most
computationally intensive portions of the TSC calculation have been
identified and accelerated using a consumer graphics processing unit
(GPU) in addition to a conventional central processing unit (CPU). A
recently developed data organization technique called Compact Binning
was used along with several existing algorithmic techniques to maximize
the scalability and performance of these computationally intensive
operations. The resulting GPU+CPU TSC bioscale calculation is more than
15 times faster than a CPU-only implementation when processing 256 × 256
× 256 data and 2.4 times faster when processing 128 × 128 × 128 data.
This eliminates the possibility of a data backlog for quantitative
sodium imaging. The accelerated quantification technique is suitable for
general three-dimensional non-Cartesian acquisitions and may enable
more sophisticated imaging techniques that acquire even more data to be
used for quantitative sodium imaging. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int
J Imaging Syst Technol, 23, 2935, 2013.