Efficient urinary stone type prediction: a novel approach based on self-distillation

Abstract Urolithiasis is a leading urological disorder where accurate preoperative identification of stone types is critical for effective treatment. Deep learning has shown promise in classifying urolithiasis from CT images, yet faces challenges with model size and computational efficiency in real clinical settings. To address these challenges, we developed a non-invasive prediction approach for determining urinary stone types based on CT images. Through the refinement and improvement of the self-distillation architecture, coupled with the incorporation of feature fusion and the Coordinate Attention Module (CAM), we facilitated a more effective and thorough knowledge transfer. This method circumvents the extra computational expenses and performance reduction linked with model compression and removes the reliance on external teacher models, markedly enhancing the efficacy of lightweight models. achieved a classification accuracy of 74.96% on a proprietary dataset, outperforming current techniques. Furthermore, our method demonstrated superior performance and generalizability on two public datasets. This not only validates the effectiveness of our approach in classifying urinary stones but also showcases its potential in other medical image processing tasks. These results further reinforce the feasibility of our model for actual clinical deployment, potentially assisting healthcare professionals in devising more precise treatment plans and reducing patient discomfort.