Diagnosis of Lumbar Spondylolisthesis Using a Pruned CNN Model

Abstract

Convolutional neural network (CNN) models have made tremendous progress in the medical domain in recent years. The application of the CNN model is restricted due to a huge number of redundant and unnecessary parameters. In this paper, the weight and unit pruning strategy are used to reduce the complexity of the CNN model so that it can be used on small devices for the diagnosis of lumbar spondylolisthesis. Experimental results reveal that by removing 90% of network load, the unit pruning strategy outperforms weight pruning while achieving 94.12% accuracy. Thus, only 30% (around 850532 out of 3955102) and 10% (around 251512 out of 3955102) of the parameters from each layer contribute to the outcome during weight and neuron pruning, respectively. The proposed pruned model had achieved higher accuracy as compared to the prior model suggested for lumbar spondylolisthesis diagnosis.