High-performance Data Management for Whole Slide Image Analysis in Digital Pathology

TL;DR

This paper presents a high-performance data management pipeline using ADIOS2 for whole-slide image analysis in digital pathology, significantly improving I/O efficiency in CPU and GPU scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a digital pathology-centric pipeline leveraging ADIOS2, achieving notable I/O speed-ups and demonstrating its effectiveness in whole-slide image analysis workflows.

Findings

ADIOS2 doubles I/O speed in CPU-based analysis.

Performance comparable to NVIDIA GDS in GPU scenario.

First known application of ADIOS2 in digital pathology.

Abstract

When dealing with giga-pixel digital pathology in whole-slide imaging, a notable proportion of data records holds relevance during each analysis operation. For instance, when deploying an image analysis algorithm on whole-slide images (WSI), the computational bottleneck often lies in the input-output (I/O) system. This is particularly notable as patch-level processing introduces a considerable I/O load onto the computer system. However, this data management process could be further paralleled, given the typical independence of patch-level image processes across different patches. This paper details our endeavors in tackling this data access challenge by implementing the Adaptable IO System version 2 (ADIOS2). Our focus has been constructing and releasing a digital pathology-centric pipeline using ADIOS2, which facilitates streamlined data management across WSIs. Additionally, we've developed strategies aimed at curtailing data retrieval times. The performance evaluation encompasses two key scenarios: (1) a pure CPU-based image analysis scenario ("CPU scenario"), and (2) a GPU-based deep learning framework scenario ("GPU scenario"). Our findings reveal noteworthy outcomes. Under the CPU scenario, ADIOS2 showcases an impressive two-fold speed-up compared to the brute-force approach. In the GPU scenario, its performance stands on par with the cutting-edge GPU I/O acceleration framework, NVIDIA Magnum IO GPU Direct Storage (GDS). From what we know, this appears to be among the initial instances, if any, of utilizing ADIOS2 within the field of digital pathology. The source code has been made publicly available at https://github.com/hrlblab/adios.