Diagnosis of Lumbar Spondylolisthesis Using Optimized Pretrained CNN Models

Spondylolisthesis refers to the slippage of one vertebral body over the adjacent one. It is a chronic condition that requires early detection to prevent unpleasant surgery. The paper presents an optimized deep learning model for detecting spondylolisthesis in X-ray radiographs. The dataset contains a total of 299 X-ray radiographs from which 156 images are showing the spine with spondylolisthesis and 143 images are of the normal spine. Image augmentation technique is used to increase the data samples. In this study, VGG16 and InceptionV3 models were used for the image classification task. The developed model is optimized by utilizing the TFLite model optimization technique. The experimental result shows that the VGG16 model has achieved a 98% accuracy rate, which is higher than InceptionV3’s 96% accuracy rate. The size of the implemented model is reduced up to four times so it can be used on small devices. The compressed VGG16 and InceptionV3 models have achieved 100% and 96% accuracy rate, respectively. Our finding shows that the implemented models were outperformed in the diagnosis of lumbar spondylolisthesis as compared to the model suggested by Varcin et al. (which had a maximum of 93% accuracy rate). Also, the developed quantized model has achieved higher accuracy rate than Zebin and Rezvy’s (VGG16 + TFLite) model with 90% accuracy. Furthermore, by evaluating the model’s performance on other publicly available datasets, we have generalised our approach on the public platform.