Parallelization of Preprocessing for Automatic Detection of Pulmonary Nodules in 3D CT Images

摘要

Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems have been introduced for therapeutic institutions to help radiologists to diagnose lung cancer at the early stage. This paper works on the parallelization of preprocessing steps in the CAD systems. We first propose a parallelization scheme based on static data grouping. The 3D lung CT images are grouped in the form of 2D image slices, and the grouped data is parallelized. Then, a pipeline-based parallelization scheme is proposed. Mutually independent steps are distributed to the respective execution units, and the preprocessing operations are performed in a parallel pipeline manner. Finally, a bus-based parallelization scheme is proposed. Based on the pipeline, a control unit is added to dynamically assign computing tasks to the various execution units. We test our schemes in an existing CAD system with data from Lung Nodule Analysis 2016 (LUNA 16) dataset, and analyze the performance of data testing.