MEDICS: Ultra-portable processing for medical image reconstruction

Medical imaging provides physicians with the ability to generate 3D images of the human body in order to detect and diagnose a wide variety of ailments. Making medical imaging portable and more accessible provides a unique set of challenges. In order to increase portability, the power consumed in image acquisition - currently the most power-consuming activity in an imaging device - must be dramatically reduced. This can only be done, however, by using complex image reconstruction algorithms to correct artifacts introduced by low-power acquisition, resulting in image processing becoming the dominant power-consuming task. Current solutions use combinations of digital signal processors, general-purpose processors and, more recently, general-purpose graphics processing units for medical image processing. These solutions fall short for various reasons including high power consumption and an inability to execute the next generation of image reconstruction algorithms. This paper presents the MEDICS architecture - a domain-specific multicore architecture designed specifically for medical imaging applications, but with sufficient generality to make it programmable. The goal is to achieve 100 GFLOPs of performance while consuming orders of magnitude less power than the existing solutions. MEDICS has a throughput of 128 GFLOPs while consuming as little as 1.6W of power on advanced CT reconstruction applications. This represents up to a 20X increase in computation efficiency over current designs.