3D ultrasound computer tomography for breast cancer diagnosis

3D ultrasound computer tomography (USCT) is a new and promising method for early breast cancer diagnosis. An ultrasound computer tomograph was developed by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and provides a resolution of 0.2 mm. The main components are the semi-ellipsoidal aperture with 628 ultrasound (US) emitters and 1413 US receivers and the 480 input channel data acquisition system. An additional external computing system is used for the time consuming image reconstruction. To reduce the reconstruction time different implementations on massive parallel computing architectures like multicore processor, GPUs and FPGAs were tested. One realization applies reconfiguration of the 60 FPGAs inside the DAQ system. The investigations show significant acceleration of the reconstruction time up to a factor of 15.8 for the latest FPGA generation and 17.6 for a state of the art GPU.