A distributed architecture for medical instrumentation: an electric current computed tomograph

Advances in electric-current computed tomography (ECCT) have resulted in reconstruction algorithms that far exceed the capabilities of the minicomputer-based architectures historically used in medical imaging devices. Further, computers optimized for reconstruction and software development tasks are not well suited to the real-time hardware control required in ECCT. The authors report their efforts to overcome these conflicting computational requirements through the use of a distributed medical-instrument architecture.<>