A cubic interpolation pipeline for fast computation of 3D deformation fields modeled using B-splines
Carlos R. Castro‐Pareja, Raj Shekhar · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2006
Fast computation of 3D deformation fields is critical to bringing the application of automated elastic image registration algorithms to routine clinical practice. However, it lies beyond the computational power of current microprocessors; therefore requiring implementations using either massively parallel computers or application-specific hardware accelerators. The use of massively parallel computers in a clinical setting is not practical or cost-effective, therefore making the use of hardware accelerators necessary. We present a hardware pipeline that allows accelerating the computation of 3D deformation fields to speeds up to two orders of magnitude faster than software implementations on current workstations and about 64 times faster than other previously reported architectures. The pipeline implements a version of the free-form deformation calculation algorithm, which is optimized to minimize the number of arithmetic operations required to calculate the transformation of a given set of neighboring voxels, thereby achieving an efficient and compact implementation in hardware which allows its use as part of a larger system.