Thanks to everyone who pointed out that our sign-up form for MicroView testing wasn't accessible.  It should be fixed now, so scroll down and try again if you're interested in taking part.

We've added a developer portal on our main website, and also started a collection of rpms for Fedora Core 15, which some developers may find useful.  In particular this collection contains the latest OFED Infiniband packages, and a recent snapshot ofglusterfs. OpenMPI 1.5-3 has also been tested against this OFED distribution for FC15 machines running kernel release 2.6.38.8-35.

We've recently been experimenting with Infiniband as a replacement for GigE networking as the fabric for a few compute-intensive ideas that we're working on.  In particular, we're evaluating OFED, Gluster and OpenMPI to see whether the impressive speed improvements that Infiniband can provide over GigE  (10-80X) justify the increase in cost of deployment.  While technologies like Myrinet, Infiniband and 10GigE are commonplace in the IT data centres of the world, it's largely seen only at the enterprise level.  Our as-of-yet unanswered question is simple:  can Infiniband be used prudently to allow for cost-effective solutions targeted at SMBs such as those in the preclinical imaging community?  We'll blog soon about our investigations.

Historically, researchers using pre-clinical CT have focused on two types of resolution – spatial and contrast. However, with cardiac CT, one should also be concerned about temporal resolution. In the clinical world, many vendors have focused on rotation speed. This is fine for human heart rates, but is not practical for pre-clinical research. Instead, it is necessary to capture information from multiple cardiac cycles. With this approach, the exposure time largely influences the temporal resolution. Recently, we tested some custom software for theCT-120 that lowers the exposure time to 6.3 ms. To the best of our knowledge, this is the fastest temporal resolution of any pre-clinical CT (a system at Duke shows results with 10 ms temporal resolution). A single projection demonstrating acceptable spatial resolution and contrast is shown in the associated graphic.