Survey on FPGAs in Medical Radiology Applications: Challenges, Architectures and Programming Models

Abstract

This paper provides a survey on hardware architectures and programming models for FPGAs in medical radiology applications. This area imposes many challenging constraints on the underlying hardware platform that can be solved best by FPGAs: hard real-time, low latency inter-device communication, safety, huge data volume, and on-the-fly image processing tasks. We consider these aspects from the application as well as from the FPGA design perspective and provide a definition and classification of the most relevant challenges, trends, and requirements. Therefore, we analyse different application scenarios ranging from basic Computed Tomography (CT) to modern Interventional Radiology systems. The main focus of our work lies on CT appliances. Finally, we discuss trends of architectures solutions and programming models in these complex systems. By means of this systematic literature survey, we derive an architectural model from real-time, patient and application constraints for hardware design and system engineering tasks.