# MedMambaLite: Hardware-Aware Mamba for Medical Image Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05049 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05049/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Mamba for medical image analysis, one of 10 directions in State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba).
- Builds on 22 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Aug 2025.

## Placed in

- State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba) / [Mamba for medical image analysis](https://mlsanity.com/ssm/mamba-for-medical-image-analysis/)
- Knowledge distillation / [Distillation for medical imaging](https://mlsanity.com/distill/distillation-for-medical-imaging/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Knowledge Distillation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05525/) (2020)
- [Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09417/) (2024)
- [VMamba: Visual State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10166/) (2024)
- [MedMNIST v2 -- A large-scale lightweight benchmark for 2D and 3D biomedical image classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14795/) (2021)
- [VM-UNet: Vision Mamba UNet for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02491/) (2024)
- [Aleatoric uncertainty estimation with test-time augmentation for medical image segmentation with convolutional neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.07356/) (2018)
- [MambaVision: A Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Vision Backbone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08083/) (2024)
- [PAD-UFES-20: a skin lesion dataset composed of patient data and clinical images collected from smartphones](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00478/) (2020)
- [MedViT: A Robust Vision Transformer for Generalized Medical Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09462/) (2023)
- [MedMamba: Vision Mamba for Medical Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03849/) (2024)
- [Recalibrating Fully Convolutional Networks with Spatial and Channel 'Squeeze & Excitation' Blocks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08127/) (2018)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Mamba Architectures for Medical Image Analysis: Classification, Segmentation, Restoration and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02362/) (2024)
- [GenAI at the Edge: Comprehensive Survey on Empowering Edge Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15816/) (2025)
- [Squeezed Edge YOLO: Onboard Object Detection on Edge Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11716/) (2023)
- [TinyM2Net-V3: Memory-Aware Compressed Multimodal Deep Neural Networks for Sustainable Edge Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12353/) (2024)
- [MambaLiteSR: Image Super-Resolution with Low-Rank Mamba using Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14090/) (2025)
- [EDEN: Entorhinal Driven Egocentric Navigation Toward Robotic Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03046/) (2025)
- [MedCL: Learning Consistent Anatomy Distribution for Scribble-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22890/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [EdgeNavMamba: Mamba Optimized Object Detection for Energy Efficient Edge Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14946/) (2025)
- [Efficient Deep Learning for Medical Imaging: Bridging the Gap Between High-Performance AI and Clinical Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00910/) (2026)
- [TinyNeRV: Compact Neural Video Representations via Capacity Scaling, Distillation, and Low-Precision Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.09220/) (2026)
- [Nutri-ATLAS: Embodied Agent for Tabulated Lookup and Assistance for Smarter nutrition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32803/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

AI-powered medical devices have driven the need for real-time, on-device inference such as biomedical image classification. Deployment of deep learning models at the edge is now used for applications such as anomaly detection and classification in medical images. However, achieving this level of performance on edge devices remains challenging due to limitations in model size and computational capacity. To address this, we present MedMambaLite, a hardware-aware Mamba-based model optimized through knowledge distillation for medical image classification. We start with a powerful MedMamba model, integrating a Mamba structure for efficient feature extraction in medical imaging. We make the model lighter and faster in training and inference by modifying and reducing the redundancies in the architecture. We then distill its knowledge into a smaller student model by reducing the embedding dimensions. The optimized model achieves 94.5% overall accuracy on 10 MedMNIST datasets. It also reduces parameters 22.8x compared to MedMamba. Deployment on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano achieves 35.6 GOPS/J energy per inference. This outperforms MedMamba by 63% improvement in energy per inference.