Multi-Thread Parallelizing of Cell Characteristics of Biomedical Images

Abstract

An approach to the parallelization of the process of calculating the quantitative characteristics of cell nuclei on biomedical images (cytological, histological, immunohistochemical) is proposed, which will speed up the process of making a diagnosis. The relevance of this task lies in the fact that there are a large number of micro-objects in the image that need to be investigated, and optimization of time and rational distribution of resources will speed up the stage of calculating the area of cell nuclei and their average brightness level. In the future, these data are stored in the database for further use as a dataset for the tasks of classification, clustering, and intellectual analysis. Modern means of data classification and intellectual analysis are used to make a diagnosis. When using convolutional neural networks, the input data to the classifier are images in the format .jpg, .png, .bmp, etc. Alternative algorithms and data processing tools in most cases require quantitative characteristics. In the case of using biomedical images, the quantitative characteristics are the area, perimeter, circumference, length, and major and lateral axes of the cell nucleus. The area and other characteristics of cell nuclei characterize the normal state or the presence of pathologies. Calculating quantitative characteristics on immunohistochemical and cytological images is time-consuming because the number of cell nuclei in one image can be in the range of 10-20 units. To create a dataset of quantitative characteristics of cell nuclei, it is necessary to perform calculations on a large number of images, which in turn requires significant resources, at a particular time. The parallelization of calculating the biomedical image characteristics is implemented on the basis of computer vision algorithms to select the necessary objects and means of software parallelization of tasks at the thread level to speed up the process of calculating the cell nucleus characteristics. It was established that the existing systems of automated microscopy and diagnostic systems based on images do not have the presence of a large number of characteristics of cell nuclei and do not have mechanisms for parallelizing the process of their calculation. The proposed approach makes it possible to speed up the process of calculating the quantitative characteristics of cell nuclei by 25 %. The relevance of the problem of parallelization is due to the need to process a large amount of data for their further reduction and classification. Thread-level parallelization improves image processing speed and does not require specialized hardware.