Reconfigurable HW-SW Co-design Platform for Lung Cancer Detection and Classification

High-performance electronics has fueled the rich emergence of medical imaging applications that led to the exponential growth in treatment and diagnostic solutions of various medical problems. High-throughput and Energy-efficient systems are required to enable the development of complex medical imaging applications. This article presents an energy-efficient hardware-software (HW-SW) co-design of a scalable and reconfigurable image segmentation/classification streaming-based processing platform explored at various design abstraction levels. Optimized algorithms and architectural techniques achieve significant savings in energy consumption and operational time. The proposed platform has been implemented on Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA board and co-simulated with Xilinx system generator, enabled real-time processing of CT scans for pulmonary nodule detection. Optimized pipelining and scheduling have minimized the memory requirements to few kB. Parallel architecture has been employed achieving 10× higher energy-efficiency compared to serial counterpart and reduced execution period by 70 ×. Clinical validation shows that parallel architecture introduces 5-7 % error in nodule characteristic determination in comparison to serial one.