An implementation of 3D Electron Tomography on FPGAs

Electron Tomography utilizes parallel beams from a transmission electron microscope to image a sample from multiple directions and reconstructs a 3D image of its density. With up to 100 directions and more than one megapixel for each image, reconstruction using algebraic reconstruction techniques is typically a time-consuming task on standard hardware. Here we present an efficient FPGA implementation of the Simultaneous Algebraic Reconstruction Technique (SART) which allows for maintaining full accuracy for electron microscopes with non-zero declination angles or twisted beams. Our design reaches 489 megavoxels/s and accelerates a comparable implementation on two Nvidia Tesla C1060 by a factor of 2.5.