Towards Efficient Pruning and Multi-Scale Feature Transformations to Uncover Medical Diseases

This study addresses a critical challenge in medical imaging diagnostics by proposing a unified, lightweight deep learning model capable of diagnosing multiple diseases across diverse imaging modalities, including chest X-rays, MRIs, skin images, and endoscopic images, within a single efficient framework. Each modality presents unique feature characteristics, introducing complexities in the diagnostic process. To enhance image quality, we apply Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization and utilize the Vision Transformer for improved feature extraction and diagnostic performance. To tackle remaining challenges, we introduce the ChirpMBPru-Net model, designed to analyze multiple image modalities in medical imaging while minimizing computational demands. This model employs the efficient MobileNet architecture as its backbone and systematically applies pruning to remove redundant layers. Moreover, a dense module for multi-scale feature extraction and the Chirplet transformation are employed in the pruned model, capturing both frequency and spatial patterns at varying scales. Additionally, the ChirpMBPru-Net model demonstrates its versatility by adapting to domain shifts in engineering fields, such as defect detection in industrial applications (e.g., scholar defect detection), where it can classify multiple categories of the same object or defect type. The model achieves an impressive accuracy of 97% across 16 disease categories and proves effective in handling real-world domain shifts, demonstrating its potential for both medical and engineering applications.