KDLight: A Lightweight Knowledge Distillation Framework for Medical Image Classification
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Conventional standalone approaches for diagnosing individual diseases often fail to achieve robust generalization because they are severely impacted by overfitting. This results in poor adaptability to diverse image representations and an inability to balance performance with computational efficiency. In this study, we propose KDLight, a lightweight, novel CNN model designed for efficient medical image classification across diverse modalities, including MRI, X-ray, radiography, skin images, and histopathology. We employ Knowledge Distillation (KD), where insights from an efficient teacher model (MobileNet) guide the learning process of the KDLight student model. The KDLight model minimizes the number of parameters while enhancing feature learning across diverse medical image representations. Experimental results show that KDLight achieves 95.55% classification accuracy with only 2.96 seconds and a compact 7.5 MB disk size, significantly reducing parameter size, accelerating inference, and lowering computational costs compared to traditional pre-trained models. Additionally, KDLight ability to efficiently learn diverse image representations can be extended to other domains, such as crack classification (e.g., road, window, and building cracks), enabling high-performance detection across different surface defect categories.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".