Verifiable and Energy Efficient Medical Image Analysis with Quantised Self-attentive Deep Neural Networks

Abstract

Convolutional Neural Networks have played a significant role in various medical imaging tasks like classification and segmentation. They provide state-of-the-art performance compared to classical image processing algorithms. However, the major downside of these methods is the high computational complexity, reliance on high-performance hardware like GPUs and the inherent black-box nature of the model. In this paper, we propose quantised stand-alone self-attention based models as an alternative to traditional CNNs. In the proposed class of networks, convolutional layers are replaced with stand-alone self-attention layers, and the network parameters are quantised after training. We experimentally validate the performance of our method on classification and segmentation tasks. We observe 50 − 80% reduction in model size, 60 − 80% lesser number of parameters, 40 − 85% fewer FLOPs and 65 − 80% more energy efficiency during inference on CPUs. The code will be available at https://github.com/Rakshith2597/Quantised-Self-Attentive-Deep-Neural-Network.