TechniScan's warm bath ultrasound (WBU) system utilizes NVIDIA Tesla GPUs to compute its complex algorithms used in creating 3 dimensional images of the breast.

"Waiting for medical results of diagnostic breast imaging is very stressful for women. The anxiety and stress can play havoc both mentally and physically," said David Robinson, chief executive officer at TechniScan. "NVIDIA Tesla GPUs have reduced the time it takes to process our data from 4.5 hours to less than 20 minutes."

As a result, women can get the results of their imaging while they are still at the hospital or clinic along with a review from their radiologist. Considering that more than 90 percent of suspicious spots or lesions are benign, many women can rest at ease after their ultrasound is negative for breast cancer.

Currently ultrasound is used as a secondary diagnostic imaging procedure when mammography is ambiguous on a breast lesion. The screening mammography can also miss some breast cancers, which makes products like the automated, whole breast, warm bath ultrasound technology from TechniScan even more relevant in breast imaging.

It's the sheer amount of information the warm bath ultrasound (WBU) system gleans that is impressive. The scanner rotates all the way around a woman's breast, capturing a scan every 2 degrees, and then composites a detailed 3-D image. Each image is around 8 to 9 million voxels (the 3-D equivalent of a pixel) and requires more than 120 million Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) calculations to build.

"NVIDIA Tesla GPUs were twice as fast as our previous cluster solution and cost half as much," said Jim Hardwick, TechniScan's senior software engineer. "It's critical for us to deliver results while the patient is still at the clinic, and NVIDIA has made this possible."

NVIDIA Tesla GPUs are being used to tackle computational challenges in many fields, such as oil exploration, drug discovery and medical imaging.

Discuss more about ultrasound in the ultrasound user group.