Deep learning-based important weights-only transfer learning approach for COVID-19 CT-scan classification.

COVID-19 has become a pandemic for the entire world, and it has significantly affected the world economy. The importance of early detection and treatment of the infection cannot be overstated. The traditional diagnosis techniques take more time in detecting the infection. Although, numerous deep learning-based automated solutions have recently been developed in this regard, nevertheless, the limitation of computational and battery power in resource-constrained devices makes it difficult to deploy trained models for real-time inference. In this paper, to detect the presence of COVID-19 in CT-scan images, an important weights-only transfer learning method has been proposed for devices with limited runt-time resources. In the proposed method, the pre-trained models are made point-of-care devices friendly by pruning less important weight parameters of the model. The experiments were performed on two popular VGG16 and ResNet34 models and the empirical results showed that pruned ResNet34 model achieved 95.47% accuracy, 0.9216 sensitivity, 0.9567 F-score, and 0.9942 specificity with 41.96% fewer FLOPs and 20.64% fewer weight parameters on the SARS-CoV-2 CT-scan dataset. The results of our experiments showed that the proposed method significantly reduces the run-time resource requirements of the computationally intensive models and makes them ready to be utilized on the point-of-care devices.

A transfer learning with structured filter pruning approach for improved breast cancer classification on point-of-care devices.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: A significant progress has been made in automated medical diagnosis with the advent of deep learning methods in recent years. However, deploying a deep learning model for mobile and small-scale, low-cost devices is a major bottleneck. Further, breast cancer is more prevalent currently, and ductal carcinoma being its most common type. Although many machine/deep learning methods have already been investigated, still, there is a need for further improvement. METHOD: This paper proposes a novel deep convolutional neural network (CNN) based transfer learning approach complemented with structured filter pruning for histopathological image classification, and to bring down the run-time resource requirement of the trained deep learning models. In the proposed method, first, the less important filters are pruned from the convolutional layers and then the pruned models are trained on the histopathological image dataset. RESULTS: We performed extensive experiments using three popular pre-trained CNNs, VGG19, ResNet34, and ResNet50. With VGG19 pruned model, we achieved an accuracy of 91.25% outperforming earlier methods on the same dataset and architecture while reducing 63.46% FLOPs. Whereas, with the ResNet34 pruned model, the accuracy increases to 91.80% with 40.63% fewer FLOPs. Moreover, with the ResNet50 model, we achieved an accuracy of 92.07% with 30.97% less FLOPs. CONCLUSION: The experimental results reveal that the pre-trained model's performance complemented with filter pruning exceeds original pre-trained models. Another important outcome of the research is that the pruned model with reduced resource requirements can be deployed in point-of-care devices for automated diagnosis applications with ease.