A Lightweight Brain-Inspired Machine Learning Framework for Coronary Angiography: Hybrid Neural Representation and Robust Learning Strategies

TL;DR

This study addresses robust coronary angiography classification under constrained resources by proposing a lightweight brain-inspired framework. It combines a stable, pretrained perceptual backbone (ResNet50) with a compact classification head, and employs brain-inspired mechanisms—attention-modulated loss via Focal Loss, label smoothing to model uncertainty, and staged selective plasticity training (warmup and selective fine-tuning)—to enhance robustness against class imbalance and annotation noise. Empirical results show strong discrimination (AUC up to $0.9374$, accuracy $85.0%$, sensitivity $96.67%$) with rapid convergence (≈2.2 minutes training) and low computational overhead, outperforming baselines. The work demonstrates a deployable, biologically plausible approach for medical image analysis on edge devices, offering a blueprint for integrating brain-inspired learning with lightweight models in clinical AI.

Abstract

Background: Coronary angiography (CAG) is a cornerstone imaging modality for assessing coronary artery disease and guiding interventional treatment decisions. However, in real-world clinical settings, angiographic images are often characterized by complex lesion morphology, severe class imbalance, label uncertainty, and limited computational resources, posing substantial challenges to conventional deep learning approaches in terms of robustness and generalization.Methods: The proposed framework is built upon a pretrained convolutional neural network to construct a lightweight hybrid neural representation. A selective neural plasticity training strategy is introduced to enable efficient parameter adaptation. Furthermore, a brain-inspired attention-modulated loss function, combining Focal Loss with label smoothing, is employed to enhance sensitivity to hard samples and uncertain annotations. Class-imbalance-aware sampling and cosine annealing with warm restarts are adopted to mimic rhythmic regulation and attention allocation mechanisms observed in biological neural systems.Results: Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed lightweight brain-inspired model achieves strong and stable performance in binary coronary angiography classification, yielding competitive accuracy, recall, F1-score, and AUC metrics while maintaining high computational efficiency.Conclusion: This study validates the effectiveness of brain-inspired learning mechanisms in lightweight medical image analysis and provides a biologically plausible and deployable solution for intelligent clinical decision support under limited computational resources.