Cellular Computers and Biomedical Image Processing

Abstract

The serial nature of conventional computers seems to restrict or, at least, obscure their usefulness as image or picture processors Since each computer instruction typically affects only one or two pieces of data, manipulations of an entire image must be accomplished through explicit iteration which costs heavily in both time and conceptual distraction. The picture processing approach we are investigating avoids these problems by defining a set of operations which acts on the image as a whole. This provides an efficient conceptual framework for picture processing tasks. In addition, the cellular nature of these operations allows them to be implemented in computer hardware architectures employing a high degree of parallelism thus eliminating the costs of iteration. To describe this type of picture processing computer we have coined the term “cytocomputer” after the Greek “cyto” which means “cell.” A first generation cytocomputer has been developed at the Environmental Research Institute of Michigan (ERIM).