Spike-Event X-ray Image Classification for 3D-NoC-Based Neuromorphic Pneumonia Detection

The success of deep learning in extending the frontiers of artificial intelligence has accelerated the application of AI-enabled systems in addressing various challenges in different fields. In healthcare, deep learning is deployed on edge computing platforms to address security and latency challenges, even though these platforms are often resource-constrained. Deep learning systems are based on conventional artificial neural networks, which are computationally complex, require high power, and have low energy efficiency, making them unsuitable for edge computing platforms. Since these systems are also used in critical applications such as bio-medicine, it is expedient that their reliability is considered when designing them. For biomedical applications, the spatio-temporal nature of information processing of spiking neural networks could be merged with a fault-tolerant 3-dimensional network on chip (3D-NoC) hardware to obtain an excellent multi-objective performance accuracy while maintaining low latency and low power consumption. In this work, we propose a reconfigurable 3D-NoC-based neuromorphic system for biomedical applications based on a fault-tolerant spike routing scheme. The performance evaluation results over X-ray images for pneumonia (i.e., COVID-19) detection show that the proposed system achieves 88.43% detection accuracy over the collected test data and could be accelerated to achieve 4.6% better inference latency than the ANN-based system while consuming 32% less power. Furthermore, the proposed system maintains high accuracy for up to 30% inter-neuron communication faults with increased latency.