Gaming graphics cards drive advances in medical imaging

by Kyle Orland { Feb 18th 2008 at 7:45PM }

We all know that gamers can actively help medical research through efforts like the PS3's Folding@Home project. Now comes word from UK's The Engineer magazine that gamers and their pumped up video cards are helping the cause of medical imaging without even trying.

You see, speeding up the processing of magnetic resonance imaging is important to prevent the blurring effects of involuntary body movement. Networked supercomputers are fast enough to do it, but they're too expensive to be a wide scale solution. However, high-powered video cards, with their 128 built-in processors, provide the perfect, low-cost method for speeding things up. And why have those graphics cards so freaking cheap and powerful? "The reason for this is the games industry," said Kings College London Professor Tobias Schaeffter. "It is amazing how much the power of the cards increases annually by putting on more processors and more memory."

So remember, the next time you plunk down hundreds of dollars for that new super-duper graphics card, you're not just helping your gaming experience -- in some small way, you're helping medical research.

Tags: graphics card, GraphicsCard, medical, MRI, NVIDIA, PS3, research, Sony, video card, VideoCard

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

fischju @ Feb 18th 2008 7:51PM

Folding@Home has had a GPU client for the ATI X1900 series for a while. Much longer than the PS3 version.

Mr.ESC @ Feb 18th 2008 8:07PM

"I'm helping,I'm helping"

(Am I the only one that read Layton Professor instead of London Professor? )

Mr.ESC @ Feb 18th 2008 8:07PM

"I'm helping,I'm helping"

(Am I the only one that read Layton Professor instead of London Professor? )

Mr.ESC @ Feb 18th 2008 8:08PM

Double U Tee eff (Question mark)

I didn't refresh or anything.

arrakisman @ Feb 18th 2008 8:12PM

I hope more industries like this move away from open GL and towards direct X cards. I was at an Autodesk conference once and the question of why comercial applications force us to use FireGL and Quadro style boards came up. The guys on the panel sort of floundered but really, these restrictions make the price of entry for creative and engineering applications that much higher.

SJ @ Feb 18th 2008 8:26PM

OpenGL is easily extensible and is multi-platform, unlike DirectX. I have mostly worked in OpenGL (and continue to work in it) and it's essential that it's development continues. Most medical imaging applications also use linux rather than Windows (what a surprise).

dcrooks @ Feb 18th 2008 8:38PM

It's because the Quadro and FireGL cards, while similar, tend to have a lot more memory than their consumer counterparts (letting you render those ten-to-hundred million poly autocad renderings at a decent framerate; once you start throwing around that many vertices, the memory that they take up is quite significant) and also the chips compute things with a higher precision, giving you more accurate results.

Also, graphics cards are OGL/DX agnostic. It's just a question of whether the drivers support the respective API (and for all of ATi and NV's stuff, their drivers support both)

ThornedVenom (Ludwig Defense Force) @ Feb 18th 2008 9:08PM

Impossible! I thought that the videogame industry only killed people!

LIES!

donny @ Feb 19th 2008 10:45PM

Linux is used in medical imaging...but its disappearing fast. Most diagnostic and reconstructive workstations are now windows based PC's...heck, even modality workstations are moving to windows based PC's.

The whole reason? Windows PC's are easier to manage centrally and help a hospital to ensure it adheres to federal security regulations. ugh.