How One Medical Team Used The Cloud To Reduce The Radiation Risk Of Advanced CT Scans

This post is sponsored by AWS & Intel.

Is it possible to take advantage of the latest CT technology while also lowering the risks associated with radiation exposure? One team in Michigan found a way to do so, using the cloud.

Over 68 million CT scans are performed each year in the US alone. CT scans can detect life-threatening conditions far better than previous imaging techniques, but the small amount of radiation absorbed during the scans has been tied to the risk of developing cancer.

The new helical CT scanners are able to capture "slices" of images to produce detailed 3D images of organs. With the development of these more sophisticated scanners and advances in imaging reconstruction, the risks associated with exposure to radiation can be lessened with lower doses. But because these safer approaches are incredibly data-intensive, centers aren't always able to evaluate helical CT scanner results in a timely and cost-effective manner.

Despite those challenges, a team from the University of Michigan was able to demonstrate striking success with low-dose scans. In their effort to improve quality, they used Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to show how the CT reconstruction of a typical helical chest scan could be handled in the cloud.

In their test runs, the team used 10 Amazon EC2 HPC cc2.8xlarge nodes, outfitted with two 8-core, 2.6GHz Intel® Xeon® processors and stocked with 60.5GB of memory. These instance types were then strung together with 10GbE for the demanding I/O requirements of their code. To address the communication between nodes, they used open source Message Passing Interface (MPI). The result was a cost-effective, low-dose scan in ultra-high resolution in just around five minutes.

Cases like this demonstrate how the medical field can benefit by using Amazon Web Services (AWS) and powerful Intel Xeon processors. Ultimately, it opens the door to reduced radiation exposure for those getting vital CT scans - which can detect tiny anomalies and lead to timely, more focused courses of treatment.

Learn how Amazon Web Services and Intel are powering the next generation of CT scans.

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