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Cracking the Internal Health Code

with Deep Learning - THINK Blog
Apr. 30th, 2018 Send to Kindle

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The endoscope and colonoscope were first developed in 1880s to look inside the
body. Specialists use their expertise and experience to examine the medical images.
But sometimes, human error and backend issues can result in misdiagnosis.

Population increase and more cases of internal diseases are overloading the medical
industry in many major cities in the world. In turn, the demand of medical specialists
continues to soar.

However, training more medical specialists is not enough. Pathologists require long-
term training and painstaking work before visually detecting abnormalities in tumor
tissues by looking through the microscope and conducting invasive tests. Deep
learning offers a better way to develop a diagnosis scope for medical inspection.

Going Deep on Deep Learning

Deep learning takes a step beyond generic machine learning by mimicking how we
humans think. However, there is a significant difference.

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In our brain, biological neurons can connect with other neurons within a certain
distance to process the data quickly. Artificial neural networks use discrete layers,
connections, and directions for data to travel.

Each layer can be assigned a task. As the data goes from the first to the final layer,
different tasks are applied. After the final layer, the final output is produced that will
offer insights. To analyze the medical images, you often need more than 100 of such
layers to identify and classify multiple appearance from millions images.

The industry always knew the usefulness of deep learning or the use of artificial
neural networks for medical purposes. But the problem hindering mass adoption
was compute power. It takes immense compute resources for a machine to “think”
like a human, especially when adding more layers to process the data.

This changed with a new type of IBM Power Systems. Recently, the Automotive and
Electronics Division of the Hong Kong Productivity Council (HKPC) has introduced
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this system to conduct research of deep learning for medical purposes.

Power-ing machine learning

As you can imagine, training the deep learning system on hundreds of thousands of
medical images with complex networks is not trivial. It requires high-power graphic
processing units, a vast internal memory and a reliable platform.

Due to the nature of Regional Convolutional Neural Networks (RCNN) for irregular
objects, a single image can be broken down into thousands of regions of interest. In
turn, each will create thousands of entries for computing the similarities.

To crunch and analyze unstructured data in non-linear ways, you need a lot of
processing power. It is important to look for a system that had the compute power
to shorten the training from weeks to hours, especially with lives at stake.

Equally important is visual image processing. The research team of HKPC uses a vast
number of images of known abnormalities to train the deep learning system to
detect better. They also use images that segment individual glands from tissues to
make it easier for the system to distinguish individual cells, determine their size,
shape, and location relative to other cells.

The IBM Power Systems platform provided them with a distributed system that
supported several GPUs at the same time. It also allowed them to share any idle GPU
with other colleagues to reduce idle times, increase the overall efficiency, and enable
them to handle multiple projects at the same time.

The platform’s proven stability was important to the research team. After all, they
wanted to help pathologists to improve their research, and not become worried
about data integrity and system failures.

The Acceleration Effect

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The IBM Power System S822LC for High Performance Computing (HPC) server,
adopted by HKPC, leverages the NVIDIA NVLink GPU interface embedded on the
POWER8 CPU, enabling a high bandwidth, low latency interconnect between CPU
and GPU.

NVIDIA NVLink’s massive memory bandwidth, which has more than 2.5 times
bandwidth compared to

PCIe, allowed the four NVIDIA Tesla GPUs and the dual POWER8 CPUs to offer a
stable platform for deep learning.

Deployed with the help of IBM Lab, the platform is already accelerating the research
in new ways. HKPC’s research team has taken a step forward to helping medical
professionals to crack the internal health code.

Related

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