IBM and the Mayo Clinic on Wednesday announced the opening of a new collaborative research facility designed to speed the processing of compute-intensive algorithms used to deliver medical images from patients' MRI and CT scans.

The Medical Imaging Informatics Innovation Center (MI3C) is the latest product of a four-year partnership between IBM and the Mayo Clinic, giving radiologists and physicians access to IBM's latest blade hardware and Cell microprocessor architecture — first used in Sony's PlayStation 3 — to render 3-D medical images that used to take hours in a matter of minutes.

"There have been algorithms out there for years that can take two-dimensional images and process them into 3-D but they take a lot of processing power and can take hours to run," Bill Rapp, IBM distinguished engineer and chief technology officer for IBM’s Healthcare and Life Sciences team, said in an interview with InternetNews.com.
http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/3720686

the power of Cell BE - one of the biggest gambles in gaming history; stories like that alone make PS3 a tool to support. I for one want Sony to innovate as much again with PS4, but with all the backlash they have gotten for using the technology, I suppose they'd not gamble as much then. They'd prolly just use a 35nm Cell with 32 SPU's, coupled to an Nvidia G240 in a less than a decade's time.

Uh... no one ever said the Cell wasn't great at number crunching... It's quite amazing at that type of processing. That doesn't mean it's great for a video game console.

true. I agree. what I mean is that without PS3, this CPU innovation would not have happened - not now at least. And that makes me support Sony with what they did with PS3. They put quite a lot at stake and took quite some risk. They deserve to be supported for that alone.

Wasn't IBM working on the cell cpu before Sony got involved?

Ah, nvm.. had my history wrong... they all codeveloped it.