T
he debate about the merits or issues video games may cause your health is ongoing, but apparently a piece of video game hardware has definite health benefits.
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| High-end PC graphics cards can lead to reduced radiation for cancer patients |
According to a report on Tech News Daily, a new study has shown that high-end PC graphics cards can be used to lower the amount of X-Rays cancer patients are exposed to during radiation treatment, lessening the damage caused to healthy tissue.
It's all tied to a treatment technique called image-guided radiation therapy, or IGRT. IGRT locates cancerous cells in the body by performing computer tomography, or CT. That's where graphics cards come in.
"CT dose has become a major concern of the medical community," said Steve Jiang, senior author of the study and an associate professor of radiation oncology at the University of California, San Diego. "For each year's use of today's scanning technology, the resulting cancers could cause about 14,500 deaths."The solution to this problem is lessening the patient's exposure to radiation from the CT process by lowering the X-Rays used, but that results in less accurate data that takes a long time to compile. And since tumors can move quickly, time is of the essence.
The solution is high-end PC graphics cards. NVIDA Tesla C1060 GPU cards, to be precise.
A new CT reconstruction algorithm created by the researchers uses a graphics card to process data in parallel - increasing computational efficiency and constructing a CT scan in about two minutes.
With only 20 to 40 X-ray projections, the team created images clear enough that the IGRT process could accurately target them, and did it an estimated 100 times faster than similar methods.
According to the study, this method results in patients receiving 36 to 72 times less radiation exposure. Less radiation means fewer complications and healthier patients, thanks to hardware designed to help run graphically intensive games like Crysis.
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