AACLiteNet: A Lightweight Model for Detection of Fine-Grained Abdominal Aortic Calcification

TL;DR

AACLiteNet is a lightweight deep learning model that accurately detects and scores abdominal aortic calcification in scans, with significantly reduced computational resources, enabling portable deployment for early cardiovascular disease risk assessment.

Contribution

The paper introduces AACLiteNet, a novel lightweight model that improves accuracy and efficiency in AAC detection and scoring compared to existing methods.

Findings

Achieves 85.94% accuracy, surpassing previous 81.98%.

Uses 19.88 times less computational cost.

Has 2.26 times smaller memory footprint.

Abstract

Cardiovascular Diseases (CVDs) are the leading cause of death worldwide, taking 17.9 million lives annually. Abdominal Aortic Calcification (AAC) is an established marker for CVD, which can be observed in lateral view Vertebral Fracture Assessment (VFA) scans, usually done for vertebral fracture detection. Early detection of AAC may help reduce the risk of developing clinical CVDs by encouraging preventive measures. Manual analysis of VFA scans for AAC measurement is time consuming and requires trained human assessors. Recently, efforts have been made to automate the process, however, the proposed models are either low in accuracy, lack granular level score prediction, or are too heavy in terms of inference time and memory footprint. Considering all these shortcomings of existing algorithms, we propose 'AACLiteNet', a lightweight deep learning model that predicts both cumulative and granular level AAC scores with high accuracy, and also has a low memory footprint, and computation cost (Floating Point Operations (FLOPs)). The AACLiteNet achieves a significantly improved one-vs-rest average accuracy of 85.94% as compared to the previous best 81.98%, with 19.88 times less computational cost and 2.26 times less memory footprint, making it implementable on portable computing devices.