Kioxia Accelerates Analysis of Large-Volume Data in Life Science Research Outcomes

Kioxia Corporation announced its contribution to the acceleration of large-volume data analysis in the research outcomes described in a new paper Expansion Sequencing: Spatially Precise In Situ Transcriptomics in Intact Biological Systems, published in the journal Science ⁽¹⁾.

Signal processing system for accelerating microscope image analysis

This acceleration was achieved by building a GPU cluster for life science research equipped with SSDs and by developing image analysis algorithms. This research on an RNA sequencing technology was led by the Synthetic Neurobiology Group at the MIT Media Lab and their collaborators, including Kioxia, and the results were obtained by utilizing the GPU cluster for image analysis.

This novel RNA sequencing technology captures multiple microscopy images of the specimen that has been physically expanded using swellable polymers, and identifies RNA sequences through image analysis, thereby maintaining the tissue structure. The image data size becomes terabytes, requiring acceleration of data analysis. By running the image analysis algorithms on he GPU cluster equipped with CM series enterprise SSDs developed by the company, the researchers were able to analyze 10TB of data from a large specimen in a few days, demonstrating the identification of RNA sequences as well as their high-resolution locations within the tissue in mouse brains and a human cancer sample.

The company will continue to conduct R&D on the acceleration of large-volume data processing, and contribute to advancing science and technology by strengthening industry-academia collaboration to foster innovations.

⁽¹⁾ Alon et al. article: ‘Expansion Sequencing: Spatially Precise In Situ Transcriptomics in Intact Biological Systems

Resource:
Information on research collaboration with the Synthetic Neurobiology Group.