Vertex Pharmaceuticals: Accelerating image segmentation for drug discovery imaging using serverless technologies on AWS

The article summarizes how Vertex Pharmaceuticals built a highly scalable and cost-effective image segmentation system for drug discovery using AWS serverless technologies.

Specifically, the article covers:

• The challenges of drug discovery involving analyzing large amounts of microscope image data
• How Vertex Pharmaceuticals modernized their architecture using AWS Step Functions Distributed Map for parallel processing of images
• The workflow involving uploading images, manual segmentation for model training, applying the trained ML model for automated segmentation, and storing results
• Performance improvements achieved, including 11x faster job completion and 90% cost reduction compared to their legacy system
• Conclusion highlighting the scalability, reliability, and cost benefits of the new serverless architecture on AWS