Weird tech: Tapping game tech to save lives

When some 22nd-century civilization exhumes our 2007 use of technologies, it will no doubt hold symposia on why turn-of-the-millennium life-saving applications -- trailing the profitability of entertainment gadgets -- had to borrow technology from teenagers' cootie-blasting video game consoles.

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Today's video game and HDTV markets are in large part defined by the graphics capabilities of GPU (graphics processing unit) multithreaded cell processors, such as PlayStation 3's RSX from Nvidia and the Cell Microprocessor from the IBM-Toshiba-Sony consortium. But although the culture's passion for bringing down Shinra or watching Celebrity Poker Showdown reruns in high definition justifies vendors' investments in optimizing complex graphics processing, an inadvertent beneficiary of this billion-dollar R&D industry is high-speed 3-D image rendering, such as that used in the medical industry.

The processing required to synthesize dozens of medical images to create a navigable 3-D representation is not unlike that used in action games. So when IBM and the Mayo Clinic announced at IEEE earlier this year that they could move medical imaging into the fourth dimension -- that is, time -- it should have come as no surprise that game technology was behind it.

The Mayo Clinic's Image Registration Application aggregates an interpreter's viewing changes over time to depict subjects such as tumors. Using chips developed for entertainment, that app can now render data nearly 50 times faster -- cutting diagnosis times dramatically.

The Mayo Clinic is by no means alone in using game technology to save lives. Last year, Mercury Computer announced it would be using the IBM-Toshiba-Sony consortium's GPU designs to produce medical-related imaging hardware. And with companies such as Rapidmind building non-game-oriented development platforms for leveraging multicore hardware, expect medical software to further its altruistic use of technology funded in large part by our desire to be entertained.

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