A Novel Multi-Dimensional Joint Search Method for the Compression of Medical Image Segmentation Models

Abstract

Due to the excellent results achieved by transformers in computer vision, more and more scholars have introduced transformers into the field of medical image segmentation. However, the use of transformers will make the model’s parameters very large, which occupies a large amount of the computer’s resources, making them very time-consuming during training. In order to alleviate this disadvantage, this paper explores a flexible and efficient search strategy that can find the best subnet from a continuous transformer network. The method is based on a learnable and uniform L1 sparsity constraint, which contains factors that reflect the global importance of the continuous search space in different dimensions, while the search process is simple and efficient, containing a single round of training. At the same time, in order to compensate for the loss of accuracy caused by the search, a pixel classification module is introduced into the model to compensate for the loss of accuracy in the model search process. Our experiments show that the model in this paper compresses 30% of the parameters and FLOPs used, while also showing a slight increase in the accuracy of the model on the Automatic Cardiac Diagnosis Challenge (ACDC) dataset.