Accelerating 3D nonrigid registration using the Cell Broadband Engine processor

Registration or alignment of medical images in clinical applications requires cost-effective high-performance computing. In this paper, we present a parallel design and implementation of a mutualinformation-based multiresolution nonrigid registration algorithm that takes advantage of the Cell Broadband Engine® (Cell/B.E.) Architecture by exploiting the different levels of parallelism and optimization strategies. The new method was tested with a dualprocessor Cell/B.E. processor-based system. The experiments show an average performance of 1.09 µs per voxel and excellent scalability, demonstrating real-time or near-real-time performance for the computationally demanding task of nonrigid image registration.