Case Study: Massachusetts General Hospital uses PPL for 3-d image-processing
We are excited to share a detailed case study involving the use of Parallel Patterns Library!
To make colon cancer screening more broadly accessible, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) sought to reduce the time required to electronically cleanse and view a three-dimensional (3-D) model of the colon from an hour to five minutes. MGH reduced processing times to two minutes by optimizing its native Visual C++ code for 64-bit execution and using the Microsoft Parallel Patterns Library (PPL) to parallelize the code, achieving the performance required to support mass colon cancer screening.
In parallelizing the electronic cleansing application, MGH relied upon the following PPL constructs:
- parallel_for and parallel_for_each for simple data parallel loops
- task_group for task parallelism and complex data parallel loops
- combinable for reductions, such as computing the sum, min, or max of a collection of values
My favorite excerpt from the case study is:
Just as impressive, MGH was able to achieve all this within a 150-day window. ”Being able to use the Microsoft Parallel Patterns Library to parallelize our native Visual C++ code was key to our success, as it enabled us to take advantage of our existing skill set and avoid rewriting algorithms we’ve already invested significant effort in validating,” says Wu. “A lot of credit also goes to Dr. Hummel, who was immensely helpful in helping us get started with—and get the most out of—the parallel programming aids provided by Microsoft.”
Adds Dr. Hummel, “The effort required just to parallelize the code was less than 30 days. At most, it required changing only a few hundred lines out of roughly 10,000.”
Link to the full case study: https://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Microsoft-Visual-Studio-2010/Massachusetts-General-Hospital/Parallelization-of-Native-C-Code-Helps-Reduce-3-D-Image-Processing-Times-by-a-Factor-of-20/4000010935
Enjoy!
Rahul V. Patil
Lead Program Manager