Use of transputers in a 3-D positron emission tomograph

The use of a VME-bus-based transputer network as a parallel processing engine for positron volume imaging (PVI) is discussed. The authors find that the speedups of parallel networks depend on two major factors, the ratio of computation to communication for a task and the size of the task, and give a simple model to explore the limits on speedups. Through actual implementation it is shown that real-time PVI data acquisition can be achieved with about 20 transputer nodes, and it is estimated that three-dimensional (3-D) image reconstruction can be achieved within 10 min using 200 nodes. Larger images and a larger number of histograms can readily be accommodated using the same parallel algorithms, as the model presented places no limits on the size of the images. The versatility and scalability of transputers makes them very suitable for use in PVI tomographs in that the same transputers can be used for speeding up data acquisition, image reconstruction, and display.