PySpark-based optimization of microwave image reconstruction algorithm for head imaging big data on high-performance computing and google cloud platform

For processing large-scale medical imaging data, adopting high-performance computing and cloud-based resources are getting attention rapidly. Due to its low-cost and non-invasive nature, microwave technology is being investigated for breast and brain imaging. Microwave imaging via space-time algorithm and its extended versions are commonly used, as it provides high-quality images. However, due to intensive computation and sequential execution, these algorithms are not capable of producing images in an acceptable time. In this paper, a parallel microwave image reconstruction algorithm based on Apache Spark on high-performance computing and Google Cloud Platform is proposed. The input data is first converted to a resilient distributed data set and then distributed to multiple nodes on a cluster. The subset of pixel data is calculated in parallel on these nodes, and the results are retrieved to a master node for image reconstruction. Using Apache Spark, the performance of the parallel microwave image reconstruction algorithm is evaluated on high-performance computing and Google Cloud Platform, which shows an average speed increase of 28.56 times on four homogeneous computing nodes. Experimental results revealed that the proposed parallel microwave image reconstruction algorithm fully inherits the parallelism, resulting in fast reconstruction of images from radio frequency sensor's data. This paper also illustrates that the proposed algorithm is generalized and can be deployed on any master-slave architecture.