Summary of the results of a preliminary study evaluating the time- and
cost-efficient scalable application of the TotalSegmentator algorithm
(58) to the IDC NLST
collection using CRDC resources. For each of the analyzed cases in the
three cohorts of sizes 1037, 9880, and 126 068 in a CT series,
the algorithm was used to segment up to 104 anatomic structures
(depending on the coverage of the anatomy in a given imaging
examination), followed by the extraction of the shape and first-order
radiomics features for each of the segmented regions using the
pyradiomics library (59). Coronal
and axial CT images (top left and center, respectively) and a surface
rendering of the segmentations generated using 3D Slicer
(https://slicer.org) software (top left) show
sample visualizations of the analysis (60). Bottom table summarizes the key parameters and observed
performance of the two experiments. The total compute time corresponds
to the time needed to perform computation sequentially. In the case of
the 126 068 series analysis (red box), scaling of the processing
to use 10 508 cloud-based virtual machines in parallel reduced
the processing time from the estimated more than 785 days by using a
single virtual machine to about 8 hours. The costs are expected to be
even lower for the researchers eligible to access the discounts provided
by the National Institutes of Health Science and Technology Research
Infrastructure for Discovery, Experimentation, and Sustainability
(STRIDES) Initiative.