IBM has tinkered with parallel computer architecture in a bid to dramatically speed the processing of 3-D medical images.

By porting and optimisation of Mayo Clinic's Image Registration Application on the IBM BladeCenter QS20 "Cell Blade” managed to process images more than 50 times faster than traditional methods.

The results will be presented in full in a joint presentation by Mayo Clinic and IBM at the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging in Washington, next week. Doctors have been using several sources including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computerized tomography (CT) scans to generate the accuracy of scans.

However when three dimensions and millions of pixels are involved, the task becomes exponentially complex.

The Mayo Clinic and IBM used 98 sets of images. It took seven hours to process 98 sets of images using traditional methods. But with 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.