Paper List

期刊: ArXiv Preprint
发布日期: 2026-03-12
BioinformaticsComputer Vision

Nyxus: A Next Generation Image Feature Extraction Library for the Big Data and AI Era

Axle Research | NovaGen Research Fund | NCATS

Nathan Hotaling, Nicholas Schaub, Andriy Kharchenko, Hamdah Abbasi, Sameeul Samee, Hythem Sidky
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IN SHORT: This paper addresses the core pain point of efficiently extracting standardized, comparable features from massive (terabyte to petabyte-scale) biomedical imaging datasets, which is hindered by fragmented, non-scalable domain-specific libraries.

核心创新

  • Methodology Introduces a unified, scalable out-of-core feature extraction library (Nyxus) designed from the ground up for 2D/3D big image data, supporting both radiomics and cellular analysis domains.
  • Methodology Enables programmatic tuning of feature hyperparameters for optimal computational efficiency or coverage, supporting novel AI/ML applications.
  • Methodology Provides multi-modal accessibility: Python package, CLI, Napari plugin, and OCI-compliant container for diverse user skill levels and cloud/HPC workflows.

主要结论

  • Nyxus outperforms domain-specific tools in speed while calculating more features: on the TissueNet dataset, it was 3x to 35x faster than CellProfiler in default mode and 58x to 131x faster in optimized ('targeted') mode for intensity and texture features.
  • The library demonstrates hardware scalability, with performance benefits plateauing after ~10 CPU threads, and provides up to 3x speedup using GPU acceleration for suitable ROI sizes (e.g., low counts of large regions >~5,000 pixels).
  • Nyxus implements the broadest feature set among tested libraries (261 features) and includes an IBSI-compliant profile for radiomics, addressing the critical need for standardization and reproducibility in quantitative image analysis.
研究空白: The field suffers from fragmented development between radiomics and cell profiling communities, leading to incompatible standards, non-scalable algorithms for big data, and difficulty in comparing feature performance and accuracy across libraries.

摘要: Modern imaging instruments can produce terabytes to petabytes of data for a single experiment. The biggest barrier to processing big image datasets has been computational, where image analysis algorithms often lack the efficiency needed to process such large datasets or make tradeoffs in robustness and accuracy. Deep learning algorithms have vastly improved the accuracy of the first step in an analysis workflow (region segmentation), but the expansion of domain specific feature extraction libraries across scientific disciplines has made it difficult to compare the performance and accuracy of extracted features. To address these needs, we developed a novel feature extraction library called Nyxus. Nyxus is designed from the ground up for scalable out-of-core feature extraction for 2D and 3D image data and rigorously tested against established standards. The comprehensive feature set of Nyxus covers multiple biomedical domains including radiomics and cellular analysis, and is designed for computational scalability across CPUs and GPUs. Nyxus has been packaged to be accessible to users of various skill sets and needs: as a Python package for code developers, a command line tool, as a Napari plugin for low to no-code users or users that want to visualize results, and as an Open Container Initiative (OCI) compliant container that can be used in cloud or super-computing workflows aimed at processing large data sets. Further, Nyxus enables a new methodological approach to feature extraction allowing for programmatic tuning of many features sets for optimal computational efficiency or coverage for use in novel machine learning and deep learning applications.