Unified reconstruction framework for multi-modal medical imaging

Abstract

Various types of advanced imaging technologies have significantly improved the quality of medical care available to patients. Corresponding medical image reconstruction algorithms, especially 3D reconstruction, play an important role in disease diagnosis and treatment assessment. However, these increasing reconstruction methods are not implemented in a unified software framework, which brings along lots of disadvantages such as breaking connection of different modalities, lack of module reuse and inconvenience to method comparison. This paper discusses reconstruction process from the viewpoint of data flow and implements a free, accelerated, extensible Unified Reconstruction Software Framework (URSF). The software framework is an abstract solution that supports multi-modal image reconstruction. The goal of this framework is to capture the common processing work flow for different modalities and different methods, make the development of reconstruction for new devices much easier, and implement a set of popular reconstruction algorithms, so that it is convenient for researchers to compare against. The overall design and certain key technologies are introduced in detail. Presented experiment examples and practical applications commendably demonstrate the validity of this framework.