January 11, 2008

The Xbox 360 may have Halo 3, but good luck if you ever get a tumor. Sony’s PlayStation 3, on the other hand, may now offer another helping hand to the medical world, according to researchers at the Mayo Clinic.

A chip originally created for the PS3 may be the key to greatly improving the way doctors monitor a tumor’s growth via computed tomography (CT) scans.

The number of images produced from just a single CT scan can overwhelm current computers. But, as anyone who’s played MotorStorm knows, the PS3’s Cell Broadband Engine processes data like a Hummer guzzles gas. Researchers announced on Monday that the Cell chip might speed up CT scan results tenfold, providing earlier opportunities for diagnosis, treatment and preventative measures.

"We are at a point with standards in technology and new genomic based analytic techniques where we can achieve more in the next 10 years than we've achieved in the last 100,” said Mayo Clinic president and CEO Denis Cortese.

The team at the legendary non-profit medical coalition, however, stressed that the superscans were very much in the planning stage. Through a partnership with IBM, the Mayo Clinic will develop the Medical Imaging Informatics Innovation Center, which will focus efficient health screening and imaging.

But this isn’t the first time the PS3’s power has been employed for fighting disease. Last year, Stanford launched its Folding@Home program, which borrowed processing muscle from the Sony gaming system to create protein-folding programs for fighting—and possibly curing—cancer.

If the Mayo-IBM research proves successful, the fact that the Cell chips are already being so widely produced (PS3 sales hit 1.2 million during the holidays) could make it that much more affordable for smaller labs to improve their own image processing. Now you know why the system costs so much.... —Brian Lisi

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shagg_187 said:

But, as anyone who’s played MotorStorm knows, the PS3’s Cell Broadband Engine processes data like a Hummer guzzles gas.


:lol :lol

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B-Ri said:

whats funny about it?

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B-Ri said:

whats funny about it?

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Grayman said:

It takes 4 hours to view the different cars to use in motorstorm

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Grayman said:

It takes 4 hours to view the different cars to use in motorstorm

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Ploid 3.0 said:

Sony to enter the catscan hardware business. Toshiba to follow suit.

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K0NY said:

Are you including your travel time to and from Best Buy's demo station?

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tokkun said:

I don't think this is particularly newsworthy. One of the guys in my lab has been working on adapting the same application to GPUs for a while.

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For this imaging project, Mayo Clinic and IBM used 98 sets of images and ran the optimized registration application on the IBM BladeCenter QS20, in comparison with running the original application on a typical processor configuration. The application running on a typical processor configuration completed the registration of all 98 sets of images in approximately seven hours. The team adapted a "mutual-information-based" 3-D linear registration algorithm application optimized for Cell/B.E. and completed the registration for all 98 sets of images in just 516 seconds, with no registration taking more than 20 seconds.

The 3-D linear algorithm finds the best spatial positioning to maximize the amount of information gathered from the two images, thereby optimizing sampling quality while reducing sampling time. Greater efficiencies were achieved by caching data in cuboids or "bricks" so image sampling did not "waste" pixels. When sampling ratio was comparatively low, the team packed the sampled moving pixel images in a contiguous fashion (in an "image stripe") to speed retrieval when needed.

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mio said:

OP's avatar scares the shit out of me

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Ploid 3.0 said:

Sony to enter the catscan hardware business. Toshiba to follow suit.

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shagg_187 said:

But, as anyone who’s played MotorStorm knows, the PS3’s Cell Broadband Engine processes data like a Hummer guzzles gas.


:lol :lol

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WinFonda said:

The only way to truly gauge Cell's power is to buy a scouter. And even then the scouter may blow up in your face upon reading.

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Truespeed said:

Considering the limitations of a GPU I wish him good luck. Come to think about it, that's probably why it's still in the 'lab' and not at the Mayo clinic.

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But, as anyone who’s tried folding@home knows, the PS3’s Cell Broadband Engine processes data like a Hummer guzzles gas.

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