BioEdge: Accelerating Object Detection in Bioimages with Edge-Based Distributed Inference

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have enabled effective object detection tasks in bioimages. Unfortunately, implementing such an object detection model can be computationally intensive, especially on resource-limited hardware in a laboratory or hospital setting. This study aims to develop a framework called BioEdge that can accelerate object detection using Scaled-YOLOv4 and YOLOv7 by leveraging edge computing for bioimage analysis. BioEdge employs a distributed inference technique with Scaled-YOLOv4 and YOLOv7 to harness the computational resources of both a local computer and an edge server, enabling rapid detection of COVID-19 abnormalities in chest radiographs. By implementing distributed inference techniques, BioEdge addresses privacy concerns that can arise when transmitting biomedical data to an edge server. Additionally, it incorporates a computationally lightweight autoencoder at the split point to reduce data transmission overhead. For evaluation, this study utilizes the COVID-19 dataset provided by the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM). BioEdge is shown to improve the inference latency of Scaled-YOLOv4 and YOLOv7 by up to 6.28 times with negligible accuracy loss compared to local computer execution in our evaluation setting.