Accessible AI Diagnostics and Lightweight Brain Tumor Detection on Medical Edge Devices

The timely and accurate detection of brain tumors is crucial for effective medical intervention, especially in resource-constrained settings. This study proposes a lightweight and efficient RetinaNet variant tailored for medical edge device deployment. The model reduces computational overhead while maintaining high detection accuracy by replacing the computationally intensive ResNet backbone with MobileNet and leveraging depthwise separable convolutions. The modified RetinaNet achieves an average precision (AP) of 32.1, surpassing state-of-the-art models in small tumor detection (APS: 14.3) and large tumor localization (APL: 49.7). Furthermore, the model significantly reduces computational costs, making real-time analysis feasible on low-power hardware. Clinical relevance is a key focus of this work. The proposed model addresses the diagnostic challenges of small, variable-sized tumors often overlooked by existing methods. Its lightweight architecture enables accurate and timely tumor localization on portable devices, bridging the gap in diagnostic accessibility for underserved regions. Extensive experiments on the BRATS dataset demonstrate the model robustness across tumor sizes and configurations, with confidence scores consistently exceeding 81%. This advancement holds the potential for improving early tumor detection, particularly in remote areas lacking advanced medical infrastructure, thereby contributing to better patient outcomes and broader accessibility to AI-driven diagnostic tools.