NanoNet: Ultra-Lightweight Network for MRI Brain Tumor Classification toward Edge AI

Tran Nguyen-Le, Huu-Thuan Huynh, Minh-Triet Tran, Trung-Nghia Le

Automated brain tumor classification from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can support accessible medical image analysis, but conventional deep learning models often exceed the resource budgets of highly constrained edge-AI platforms. We present NanoNet, an ultra-lightweight convolutional neural network designed for resourceconstrained MRI classification and motivated by future edge-AI applications. Inspired by MobileNetV2, NanoNet substantially reduces network depth, channel capacity, expansion ratios, and final feature dimensionality, resulting in only five inverted residual blocks and 8,132 parameters. We further investigate dependency-aware structured pruning, knowledge distillation, and INT8 quantization-aware training for additional compression. Experiments on the BRISC 2025 benchmark show that NanoNet achieves 92.80% accuracy and 92.97% macro F1 with 8,132 parameters and 10.498 MFLOPs. Across three compression seeds, it exceeds the mean accuracy of 70%-pruned MobileNetV2 by 5.20 percentage points while using 60.2% fewer parameters and 9.8% less computation. Converted INT8 NanoNet achieves 89.70% accuracy and 90.22% macro F1 across three QAT seeds. Earlier TensorFlow Lite…