Optimized FPGA-Based Implementation of Brain Tumor Detection by Combining K-Means and Grey Wolf Optimization Algorithms

There is a need for fast, accurate, and real-time algorithms to detect brain tumors effectively to support the physician’s decision-making for treatment purposes. A brain tumor is a life-threatening uncontrolled growth of cells and tissues that may cause death due to inaccurate and late detection. K-means clustering is one of the clustering techniques that is widely used in brain tumor detection, but it has some drawbacks such as dependency on initial centroid values and a tendency to fall on local optima. This research proposes a new model that uses grey wolf optimization to find the optimal value of K (clusters number) of the k-means algorithm to avoid local optima. A parallel implementation of the K-means clustering algorithm on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is also proposed to enhance the performance by reducing the processing time and the power consumption. Moreover, the proposed algorithm is implemented using the Vivado HLS tool on Xilinx Kintex7 XC7K160t FPGA 484-1 where different optimization techniques are adopted and applied, such as loop unrolling, loop pipelining, dataflow, and loop merging. The achieved speed-up of the parallel implementation compared with sequential implementation was 88.17, where the obtained average clustering accuracy was 97.11%.