Quantized Machine Learning Models for Medical Imaging in Low-Resource Healthcare Settings

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that lightweight, quantized deep learning models can effectively perform brain tumor classification from MRI scans, enabling deployment in low-resource healthcare environments without significant accuracy loss.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-strategy compression framework combining quantization-aware training, knowledge distillation, and post-training quantization for medical imaging models.

Findings

Quantized MobileNetV2 achieves 82.37% accuracy, similar to full-precision models.

Model size reduced from 35.34 MB to 5.76 MB, a 6.14x compression ratio.

Quantization maintains diagnostic performance across all tumor categories.

Abstract

Deep learning models have shown strong performance in medical image analysis, but deploying them in low-resource clinical environments remains difficult due to computational, memory, and power constraints. This paper presents a multi-strategy compression framework for brain tumor classification from MRI, encompassing quantization-aware training, knowledge distillation from a DenseNet-101 teacher to a compact DenseNet-32 student with low-bit post-training quantization, and Float16 post-training quantization on a lightweight MobileNetV2 backbone. Using a multi-class brain tumor MRI dataset containing glioma, meningioma, pituitary tumors, and healthy controls, we provide full experimental validation of the MobileNetV2-based pipeline, training the classifier through a three-stage transfer learning process and applying Float16 quantization via TensorFlow Lite. The DenseNet-based distillation and quantization-aware training strategies are described as complementary compression approaches within the framework, with their complete empirical evaluation reserved for future work. Experimental results on the MobileNetV2 pipeline show that the quantized model achieves 82.37 percent validation accuracy compared to the 82.20 percent full-precision baseline, reducing model size from 35.34 MB to 5.76 MB, a 6.14x compression ratio with no meaningful accuracy loss. Per-class evaluation confirms that quantization preserves diagnostic performance uniformly across all four tumor categories. These findings demonstrate that lightweight quantized models can deliver clinically viable brain tumor screening in resource-constrained healthcare settings.