Acceleration of early-photon fluorescence molecular tomography with graphics processing units.

Fluorescence molecular tomography (FMT) with early-photons can improve the spatial resolution and fidelity of the reconstructed results. However, its computing scale is always large which limits its applications. In this paper, we introduced an acceleration strategy for the early-photon FMT with graphics processing units (GPUs). According to the procedure, the whole solution of FMT was divided into several modules and the time consumption for each module is studied. In this strategy, two most time consuming modules (Gd and W modules) were accelerated with GPU, respectively, while the other modules remained coded in the Matlab. Several simulation studies with a heterogeneous digital mouse atlas were performed to confirm the performance of the acceleration strategy. The results confirmed the feasibility of the strategy and showed that the processing speed was improved significantly.