PS3 Cell Chip to Tackle Medical Imaging

via gizmodo

IBM and the Mayo Clinic have announced that they will be using the Cell Broadband Engine, the same processor that can help cure Alzheimer's and blast away the Germans in Call of Duty to now speed up object recognition and increase image precision with medical imaging software. The results of this implementation will be presented later this week at the International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (sounds like a party-fest) in Washington, D.C.

For an example of what this means: Previously it took the old processor configuration 25,200 seconds to complete a object recognition task of 98 images and on the Cell processor it only took 516 seconds to complete the same recognition task. Efficiency is key with this upgrade. Faster recognition by all kinds of imaging machines (CT scanners, MRI machines, etc) means saved lives. Easy as that.