Medical image analysis, empowered by artificial intelligence (AI), plays a crucial role in modern healthcare diagnostics. However, the effectiveness of machine learning models hinges on their ability to generalize to diverse patient populations, presenting domain shift challenges. This study explores the domain shift problem in chest X-ray classification, focusing on cross-population variations, especially in underrepresented groups. We analyze the impact of domain shifts across three population datasets acting as sources using a Nigerian chest X-ray dataset acting as the target. Model performance is evaluated to assess disparities between source and target populations, revealing large discrepancies when the models trained on a source were applied to the target domain. To address with the evident domain shift among the populations, we propose a supervised adversarial domain adaptation (ADA) technique. The feature extractor is first trained on the source domain using a supervised loss function in ADA. The feature extractor is then frozen, and an adversarial domain discriminator is introduced to distinguish between the source and target domains. Adversarial training fine-tunes the feature extractor, making features from both domains indistinguishable, thereby creating domain-invariant features. The technique was evaluated on the Nigerian dataset, showing significant improvements in chest X-ray classification performance. The proposed model achieved a 90.08% accuracy and a 96% AUC score, outperforming existing approaches such as multi-task learning (MTL) and continual learning (CL). This research highlights the importance of developing domain-aware models in AI-driven healthcare, offering a solution to cross-population domain shift challenges in medical imaging.

Recent advances in computing allows researchers to propose the automation of hydroponic systems to boost efficiency and reduce manpower demands, hence increasing agricultural produce and profit. A completely automated hydroponic system should be equipped with tools capable of detecting plant diseases in real-time. Despite the availability of deep-learning-based plant disease detection models, the existing models are not designed for an embedded system environment, and the models cannot realistically be deployed on resource-constrained IoT devices such as raspberry pi or a smartphone. Some of the drawbacks of the existing models are the following: high computational resource requirements, high power consumption, dissipates energy rapidly, and occupies large storage space due to large complex structure. Therefore, in this paper, we proposed a low-power deep learning model for plant disease detection using knowledge distillation techniques. The proposed low-power model has a simple network structure of a shallow neural network. The parameters of the model were also reduced by more than 90%. This reduces its computational requirements as well as its power consumption. The proposed low-power model has a maximum power consumption of 6.22 w, which is significantly lower compared to the existing models, and achieved a detection accuracy of 99.4%.

As edge computing gains attention across various domains, the demand for lightweight deep learning models capable of running efffciently on resource-constrained edge devices has surged. This survey investigates the landscape of lightweight deep learning models tailored for edge computing environments. The survey explores various model compression techniques used to design and optimize deep learning models for edge deployment, including model quantization, pruning, and knowledge distillation. Emphasis is placed on strategies to reduce model size, computational complexity, and memory footprint while maintaining satisfactory performance levels. Additionally, the study examines the performances of these techniques on three real-life datasets evaluating lightweight deep learning models, highlighting the importance of balanced datasets representative of edge device deployment scenarios. Furthermore, this survey provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of lightweight deep learning models for edge devices, offering insights into design considerations, optimization techniques, and performance evaluation methodologies. The ffndings show that most of the compression techniques suffer from performance degradation, proving the existence of a trade-off between compression and performance. Therefore, we proposed a hybrid losslesscompressed model by combining pruning quantization, and knowledge distillation, to reduce parameters and weights, resulting in a lightweight model. The proposed model is three times smaller than the vanilla CNN model and achieved a state-of-the-art accuracy of 97% after compression, which shows the effectiveness of our approach. These results will serve as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners aiming to develop efffcient and scalable deep learning solutions for edge computing applications.

Despite recent advances in deep learning, the rise of edge devices, and the exponential growth of Internet of Things (IoT) connected devices undermine the performance of deep learning models. It is clear that the future of computing is moving to edge devices. Autonomous vehicles and self-driving cars have leveraged the power of computer vision, especially object detection to navigate through traffic safely. Nevertheless, to be able to drive on all types of roads, these new vehicles have to be equipped with a road anomaly detection system, which strikes the need for small deep learning models of detecting road anomalies that can be deployed on these vehicles for safer driving experience. However, the current deep learning models are not practical on embedded devices due to the heavy resource requirements of the models, as such cannot be deployed on embedded devices. This paper proposes a theoretical approach to building a lightweight model from a cumbersome pothole detection model that is suitable on edge devices using knowledge distillation. It presents the theoretical approach of knowledge distillation, why it is a better technique of model compression compared to the rest. It shows that a cumbersome model can be made lightweight without sacrificing accuracy and with a reduced time complexity and faster training time.

Deep learning has achieved expert-level performance in medical imaging analysis. However, models often fail to generalize across patient populations due to cross-population domain shifts, distributional differences arising from demographic variability, variations in imaging protocols, scanner hardware, and differences in disease prevalence. This challenge limits the real-world deployment and can increase health inequities. This review systematically examines the nature, causes, and impact of cross-population domain shift in deep learning-based medical imaging analysis. We analyzed 50 peer-reviewed studies from 2020 to 2025, evaluating the proposed methodologies for handling population shifts, the datasets employed, and the metrics used to assess performance. Our findings demonstrate that performance degradation ranged from 10–25% when models were tested on unseen populations, emphasizing the substantial impact of domain shifts on model generalizability. The literature reveals that mitigation strategies broadly fall into two categories: data-centric approaches, such as augmentation and harmonization, and model-centric approaches, including domain adaptation, transfer learning, adversarial learning, multi-task learning, and continual learning. While domain adaptation and transfer learning are the most widely used, their performance gains across populations remain modest, ranging from 5–15%, and are not supported by external validation. Our synthesis reveals a significant reliance on large, publicly available datasets from limited regions, with an underrepresentation of data from low- and middle-income countries. Evaluation practices are inconsistent, with few studies employing standardized external test sets. This review provides a structured taxonomy of mitigation techniques, a refined analysis of domain shift characteristics, and an in-depth critique of methodological challenges. We highlight the urgent need for more geographically and demographically inclusive datasets, adaptable modeling techniques, and standardized evaluation protocols to enable accurate and equitable AI-driven diagnostics across diverse populations. Finally, we outline future research directions to guide the development of robust, generalizable, and fair models for medical imaging analysis.