15:15 Multicore + GPUs can protect your bones: Rendering the Computerized Diagnosis of Osteoporosis a
Routine Clinical Practice – C. Bekas (IBM Zurich)
Coupling recent imaging capabilities with microstructural finite element analysis offers a powerful tool to determine bone stiffness and strength. It shows high potential to improve individual fracture risk prediction, a tool much needed in the diagnosis and treatment of Osteoporosis that is, according to the World Health Organization, second only to cardiovascular disease as a leading health care problem. We present a high performance computational framework that aims to render the computerized diagnosis of Osteoporosis an everyday, routine clinical practice. In our setting the CAT scanner is fitted with a high performance multicore computing system that is supported by hardware accelerators such as GPUs. The goal is for images from the scanner to be fed into the computational model and thus several load conditions to be simulated in a matter of minutes. Low time to solution is achieved by means of a novel low complexity mixed precision iterative refinement linear solver that can take great advantage of hardware accelerators. The result is an accurate strength profile of the bone.