Optical computers for the video-rate reconstruction of medical images

In both computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance (MR) imaging, continuous video-rate data acquisition, with retrospective cine-mode viewing of the reconstructed image sequence, is possible. With video-rate image reconstruction, a videographic capability for these imaging modalities is achieved, whereby dynamic events within the human body can be viewed in real-time. The computational requirement of real-time image reconstruction is extreme and has not been demonstrated to date using conventional digital-electronic circuitry. The high degree of parallelism of analog optical computers can be exploited to achieve very high computational rates and accomplish the goal of video-rate reconstruction of these medical images. Systems for CT and MR image reconstruction are described, results are presented, and performance of the systems is discussed.