Year: 2021
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Neuroscience identifies structural brain patterns that correlate to human characteristics and disease. Medical image analysis of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Positron Emission Tomography (PET), or Computed Tomography (CT) provides extensive data points of brain composition. Processing brain scans often connects medical imaging steps, including, among others, intensity normalization, identifying landmarks, inhomogeneity correction, tissue segmentation, regional segmentation, cortical depth segmentation, and finally, resampling and registering to shared space. Preparing brain scan data must be reliably reproducible and scalable to thousands of data sets to contribute to further discovery through medical image analysis. This project defines a modular pipeline to execute a series of medical imaging software applications to prepare brain scans for further analysis. The SINAPSE Lab at the University of Iowa previously created an automated brain scan analysis tool named AutoWorkup to process raw MRI data. AutoWorkup executes a series of command-line calls to executable medical imaging tools. However, the limited caching ability of Nipype hinders sharing the results of executing these commands. AutoWorkup uses the dataflow engine Nipype to integrate with the grid computing software system Sun Grid Engine (SGE). This SGE interface does not scale well to large datasets as AutoWorkup submits each task as an individual job, exceeds job submission limits, and overloads SGE. This project recreated AutoWorkup to seamlessly scale to larger datasets and share reproducible results using the dataflow engine Pydra. This work contributed an extension to the Pydra workflow engine that allows for the collection and submission of tasks via job array for scalable distributed computing to avoid exceeding job limits and overloading. Pydra also implements caching entire workflows and sharing a cache across workflows. These features enable sharing AutoWorkup results to be more reproducible and verifiable by the greater medical imaging community. AutoWorkup was recreated with Pydra to take advantage of the updated features of this new dataflow engine.
DOI: 10.17077/etd.005958
Authors: Charles Edward Johnson, Guadalupe Canahuate, Hans Johnson, Tyler Bell
Language: English
Subfield: Information Systems and Management
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4386656222