Performance-Aware Architectures for Parallel 4D Color fMRI Filtering Algorithm: A Complete Performance Indices Package.

A parallel 4D fMRI filtering algorithm is proposed to overcome the bottlenecks of large 4D volumetric fMRI data and its overlapping segments by input decimation, multidimensional intensive computation by parallel processing and the boundary conditions by output interpolation. Three spatial convolution architectures implement this parallel multidimensional filtering algorithm in Virtex-6 FPGA board, as automated 4D fMRI filtering systems. These three automated filtering systems are devised as “plug and develop” processors to filter any 4D volumetric data. Then, two sets of generic Edge and noise smoothing filtering operators are prototypically plugged and developed to be improved for filtering a dementia case study of color 256 × 256 × 4 × 3 volumetric fMRI. Accordingly, performance indices of the three architectures are evaluated as a complete package of area, speed, dynamic power, and throughput. Significant improvements have been achieved in keeping a stable speed, decreasing power consumption and increasing throughput in color fMRI filtering applications. All three architectures have an operating (225 MHz) maximum frequency. The power consumption improved more than two-fold using architecture 2 compared to 3. The highest throughput is achieved by architectures 2 and 3 almost (2.5) times than that of architecture 1. Evidently, all three architectures are performance-aware processors, and architecture 2 is optimal.