High-performance Reconstruction in Computer Tomography: Formal Specification and Implementation

Subject of this work is the hardware architecture for the X-ray Computer Tomography which is a powerful tool for the investigations of the inner structure of objects. The main aim of the work is the development of formally specified, scalable and high-performance hardware for the volume reconstruction from cone-beam projections. The modifications of the original Feldkamp reconstruction algorithm: parallelization and pipelining of the reconstruction were formalized. Hardware solution contains an FPGA chip with the memory subsystem. The design is completely modular with formal specification. It implements all steps of the reconstruction from projections: filtering, weighted backprojection, real-time geometry computations. Due to the formal specification and parameterized VHDL implementation the architecture is easy modifiable and scalable. The speed-up of the reconstruction is about an order of a magnitude compared to the available PC implementations.