In the past decades, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have demonstrated an interesting physical platform to facilitate quantum information processing, particularly in the emergence of domain-specific hardware accelerators for quantum computing emulation and quantum key distillation. While conventional general-purpose hardware platforms have been used for quantum information processing, FPGAs promise deep pipeline parallelism, adaptable interface and trivial support for custom-precision operation. Therefore, the time is ripe for describing recent development of quantum computing emulators and quantum key distillation accelerators on FPGAs. In this article, we provide a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art in this active field, with a balance between theoretical, implementational and technological results. Challenges and promising research opportunities are also discussed.

Objectives: Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common malignant primary brain tumor with local recurrence after radiotherapy (RT), the most common mode of failure. Standard RT practice applies the prescription dose uniformly across tumor volume disregarding radiological tumor heterogeneity. We present a novel strategy using diffusion-weighted (DW-) MRI to calculate the cellular density within the gross tumor volume (GTV) in order to facilitate dose escalation to a biological target volume (BTV) to improve tumor control probability (TCP). Methods: The pre-treatment apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) maps derived from DW-MRI of ten GBM patients treated with radical chemoradiotherapy were used to calculate the local cellular density based on published data. Then, a TCP model was used to calculate TCP maps from the derived cell density values. The dose was escalated using a simultaneous integrated boost (SIB) to the BTV, defined as the voxels for which the expected pre-boost TCP was in the lowest quartile of the TCP range for each patient. The SIB dose was chosen so that the TCP in the BTV increased to match the average TCP of the whole tumor. Results: By applying a SIB of between 3.60 Gy and 16.80 Gy isotoxically to the BTV, the cohort’s calculated TCP increased by a mean of 8.44% (ranging from 7.19 to 16.84%). The radiation dose to organ at risk is still under their tolerance. Conclusions: Our findings indicate that TCPs of GBM patients could be increased by escalating radiation doses to intratumoral locations guided by the patient’s biology (i.e., cellularity), moreover offering the possibility for personalized RT GBM treatments. Advances in knowledge: A personalized and voxel level SIB radiotherapy method for GBM is proposed using DW-MRI, which can increase the tumor control probability and maintain organ at risk dose constraints.