A Scalable Inference Pipeline for 3D Axon Tracing Algorithms

High inference times of machine learning-based axon tracing algorithms pose a significant challenge to the practical analysis and interpretation of large-scale brain imagery. This paper explores a distributed data pipeline that employs a SLURM-based job array to run multiple machine learning algorithm predictions simultaneously. Image volumes were split into N (1–16) equal chunks that are each handled by a unique compute node and stitched back together into a single 3D prediction. Preliminary results comparing the inference speed of 1 versus 16 node job arrays demonstrated a 90.95% decrease in compute time for 32 GB input volume and 88.41% for 4 GB input volume. The general pipeline may serve as a baseline for future improved implementations on larger input volumes which can be tuned to various application domains.