Focus: Edge-AI solutions for healthcare and
industry 4.0 (4IR) applications using resource
constrained embedded devices
Dr. Mohammed Zubair has successfully completed ML research
projects across varying disciplines including healthcare, chemicals
industry, energy sector and wireless communications. Currently he
is working with the University of São Paulo (Brazil) and the
University of St. Andrews (U.K.) on developing intelligent edge
vision models for screening Neglected Tropical Diseases. Dr.
Mohammed Zubair holds a Master's degree in Electronics &
Electrical Engineering and a PhD in Electronics Engineering, both
from the University of Dundee, U.K. He is also a Senior Member
of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) USA.
Diagnosing Oral Cavity Cancer (OCC) in its initial stages is an effective way to reduce patient mortality. However, current pre-screening solutions are manual and the resultant clinical treatment isn’t cost-effective for the average individual, primarily in developing nations. We present an automated and inexpensive pre-screening solution utilizing Artificial Intelligence (AI) deployed on embedded edge devices to detect benign and pre-malignant superficial oral tongue lesions. The proposed machine vision solution utilizes a clinically annotated photographic dataset of 9 types of superficial oral tongue lesions to retrain a MobileNetV2 neural network using transfer learning. In this approach, we also utilized TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers to quantize a 32-bit floating-point (float32) precision model into an 8-bit integer (int8) model for deployment on power and resource-constrained OpenMV Cam H7 Plus embedded edge device.
What deployment approach does Dr. Mohammed Zubair Shamim present for pre-screening oral tongue lesions on low-power embedded devices?
AUse a TinyML pipeline: build a clinically annotated dataset of nine lesion types, train via Edge Impulse, quantize the model, and deploy it on an OpenMV Cam H7 Plus for real-time inference.
BTrain a large float32 MobileNetV2 on cloud servers and stream clinic images to the cloud for inference to avoid device constraints.
CRely on manual pre-screening guided by printed reference charts on the device to help non-specialists triage patients.
DImplement a purely rule-based image processing algorithm on the OpenMV Cam H7 Plus (no ML) to avoid quantization and ML complexity.
EUse a proprietary mobile app that uploads patient photos to a central server for batch processing without any edge inference.
Why did the speaker quantize the model from float32 to int8 before deploying it on the OpenMV Cam H7 Plus?
ATo reduce model size and computational requirements so it can run within the device's power and resource constraints.
BBecause quantization inherently increases accuracy on medical images by making models more noise-robust.
CBecause quantization converts the neural network into a rule-based decision tree that no longer needs training data.
DBecause quantization is a mandatory regulatory step for FDA approval of medical AI devices.
EBecause quantization allows the device to capture higher-resolution images from the camera.