A collaborative inference strategy for medical image diagnosis in mobile edge computing environment

The popularity and convenience of mobile medical image analysis and diagnosis in mobile edge computing (MEC) environments have greatly improved the efficiency and quality of healthcare services, necessitating the use of deep neural networks (DNNs) for image analysis. However, DNNs face performance and energy constraints when operating on the mobile side, and are limited by communication costs and privacy issues when operating on the edge side, and previous edge-end collaborative approaches have shown unstable performance and low search efficiency when exploring classification strategies. To address these issues, we propose a DNN edge-optimized collaborative inference strategy (MOCI) for medical image diagnosis, which optimizes data transfer and computation allocation by combining compression techniques and multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) methods. The MOCI strategy first uses coding and quantization-based compression methods to reduce the redundancy of image data during transmission at the edge, and then dynamically segments the DNN model through MARL and executes it collaboratively between the edge and the mobile device. To improve policy stability and adaptability, MOCI introduces the optimal transmission distance (Wasserstein) to optimize the policy update process, and uses the long short-term memory (LSTM) network to improve the model's adaptability to dynamic task complexity. The experimental results show that the MOCI strategy can effectively solve the collaborative inference task of medical image diagnosis and significantly reduce the latency and energy consumption with less than a 2% loss in classification accuracy, with a maximum reduction of 38.5% in processing latency and 71% in energy consumption compared to other inference strategies. In real-world MEC scenarios, MOCI has a wide range of potential applications that can effectively promote the development and application of intelligent healthcare.