Northeastern University in Boston and Massachusetts General Hospital just received a $1.3Million NSF grant to develop technology using GPU’s, CUDA, and OpenCL to accelerate the analysis and processing of various medical imaging technologies from hours to real-time.

Early on in the effort, MGH has already shown that the parallel technology can cut the time it takes to read a 3D-radiological breast image from hours to seconds, meaning a patient could be cleared to have a biopsy during a visit to the doctor for a breast exam.

Currently a staff of 10 people is working on the project, and they hope to have the technology in the hands of medical vendors by year’s end.  In addition to simply improving turnaround time, they are working on a system capable of tracking moving tumors in real-time for interactive automatic radiotherapy systems.

via Gaming tech spurs development of hyperfast medical imaging systems and Images in a Flash