A novel System on Chip design for Thyroid imaging studies

The computational resources of a System on Chip (SoC) accompanied by their compact design tailors to the needs of current medical devices where there is a necessity for visualizing and performing diagnosis in real-time. Currently we are developing a Small Organ Imaging Gamma Camera (SOIGC) for imaging small organs with higher spatial and energy resolution. We present here a novel “SoC” based real-time medical image processing tool for evaluation and quantification of Thyroid Uptake Ratio derived from Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT).The Thyroid Uptake Ratio is a diagnostic index used extensively to assess Thyroid's hormonal activity obtained by quantifying the intensity of the segmented SPECT images which are conventionally done on expensive propriety tools. In contrast to these, our lower cost SoC tool based on DSP architecture offers a higher speed image segmentation process with co-relating performance. Thus, it also eliminates the need for higher computing resources on the host machine by using a Hardware accelerator called “Pipeline Vision Processor” of an optimized Dual Core Digital Signal Processor. This architecture offers a high performance enhanced infrastructure with large on-chip memory and reduces the overall bandwidth requirement leading to accelerated imaging. We have cross-validated the performance of this tool by evaluating 27 medical case studies with thyroid medical history. As compared to diagnosis by propriety SIEMENS software or segmentation tools based on MATLAB, our hardware accelerated approach has shown a drastic reduction of computational time of about 250% with superior correlation. This SoC tool can be extended and realized for various other Medical Imaging procedures like Kidney's Glomerular Filtration Rate and Myocardial Perfusion studies of Heart.