Department of Radiology, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305.
Med Phys. 2013 Nov;40(11):111914. doi: 10.1118/1.4824926.
In the community of x-ray imaging, there is a multitude of tools and applications that are used in scientific practice. Many of these tools are proprietary and can only be used within a certain lab. Often the same algorithm is implemented multiple times by different groups in order to enable comparison. In an effort to tackle this problem, the authors created CONRAD, a software framework that provides many of the tools that are required to simulate basic processes in x-ray imaging and perform image reconstruction with consideration of nonlinear physical effects.
CONRAD is a Java-based state-of-the-art software platform with extensive documentation. It is based on platform-independent technologies. Special libraries offer access to hardware acceleration such as OpenCL. There is an easy-to-use interface for parallel processing. The software package includes different simulation tools that are able to generate up to 4D projection and volume data and respective vector motion fields. Well known reconstruction algorithms such as FBP, DBP, and ART are included. All algorithms in the package are referenced to a scientific source.
A total of 13 different phantoms and 30 processing steps have already been integrated into the platform at the time of writing. The platform comprises 74.000 nonblank lines of code out of which 19% are used for documentation. The software package is available for download at http://conrad.stanford.edu. To demonstrate the use of the package, the authors reconstructed images from two different scanners, a table top system and a clinical C-arm system. Runtimes were evaluated using the RabbitCT platform and demonstrate state-of-the-art runtimes with 2.5 s for the 256 problem size and 12.4 s for the 512 problem size.
As a common software framework, CONRAD enables the medical physics community to share algorithms and develop new ideas. In particular this offers new opportunities for scientific collaboration and quantitative performance comparison between the methods of different groups.
在 X 射线成像领域，有许多在科学实践中使用的工具和应用程序。其中许多工具是专有的，只能在特定的实验室中使用。通常，为了能够进行比较，不同的团队会多次实现相同的算法。为了解决这个问题，作者创建了 CONRAD，这是一个软件框架，它提供了许多模拟 X 射线成像基本过程和考虑非线性物理效应进行图像重建所需的工具。
CONRAD 是一个基于 Java 的最先进的软件平台，具有广泛的文档。它基于独立于平台的技术。特殊的库提供了对硬件加速的访问，例如 OpenCL。它具有易于使用的并行处理接口。软件包包括不同的模拟工具，能够生成高达 4D 的投影和体积数据以及相应的矢量运动场。包括 FBP、DBP 和 ART 等知名重建算法。包中的所有算法都参考了科学来源。
在撰写本文时，已有 13 种不同的体模和 30 个处理步骤集成到该平台中。该平台包含 74000 行非空行代码，其中 19%用于文档。该软件包可在 http://conrad.stanford.edu 下载。为了演示该软件包的使用，作者从两个不同的扫描仪重建了图像，一个是台式系统，另一个是临床 C 臂系统。使用 RabbitCT 平台评估了运行时间，并展示了最先进的运行时间，对于 256 大小的问题，运行时间为 2.5 秒，对于 512 大小的问题，运行时间为 12.4 秒。
作为一个通用的软件框架，CONRAD 使医学物理社区能够共享算法并开发新想法。特别是，这为不同团队之间的科学合作和方法的定量性能比较提供了新的机会。
