# Explainable Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Medical Image Classification Source: [Explainable Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Medical Image Classification]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-26T05:27:47.170Z Authors: Aqib Nazir Mir, Danish Raza Rizvi Published: 2025-08-21T05:22:47.000Z ## Abstract This study comprehensively explores knowledge distillation frameworks for COVID-19 and lung cancer classification using chest X-ray (CXR) images. We employ high-capacity teacher models, including VGG19 and lightweight Vision Transformers (Visformer-S and AutoFormer-V2-T), to guide the training of a compact, hardware-aware student model derived from the OFA-595 supernet. Our approach leverages hybrid supervision, combining ground-truth labels with teacher models' soft targets to balance accuracy and computational efficiency. We validate our models on two benchmark datasets: COVID-QU-Ex and LCS25000, covering multiple classes, including COVID-19, healthy, non-COVID pneumonia, lung, and colon cancer. To interpret the spatial focus of the models, we employ Score-CAM-based visualizations, which provide insight into the reasoning process of both teacher and student networks. The results demonstrate that the distilled student model maintains high classification performance with significantly reduced parameters and inference time, making it an optimal choice in resource-constrained clinical environments. Our work underscores the importance of combining model efficiency with explainability for practical, trustworthy medical AI solutions. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()