LesionScanNet: dual-path convolutional neural network for acute appendicitis diagnosis

Acute appendicitis is an abrupt inflammation of the appendix, which causes symptoms such as abdominal pain, vomiting, and fever. Computed tomography (CT) is a useful tool in accurate diagnosis of acute appendicitis; however, it causes challenges due to factors such as the anatomical structure of the colon and localization of the appendix in CT images. In this paper, a novel Convolutional Neural Network model, namely, LesionScanNet for the computer-aided detection of acute appendicitis has been proposed. For this purpose, a dataset of 2400 CT scan images was collected by the Department of General Surgery at Kanuni Sultan Süleyman Research and Training Hospital, Istanbul, Turkey. LesionScanNet is a lightweight model with 765 K parameters and includes multiple DualKernel blocks, where each block contains a convolution, expansion, separable convolution layers, and skip connections. The DualKernel blocks work with two paths of input image processing, one of which uses 3 × 3 filters, and the other path encompasses 1 × 1 filters. It has been demonstrated that the LesionScanNet model has an accuracy score of 99% on the test set, a value that is greater than the performance of the benchmark deep learning models. In addition, the generalization ability of the LesionScanNet model has been demonstrated on a chest X-ray image dataset for pneumonia and COVID-19 detection. In conclusion, LesionScanNet is a lightweight and robust network achieving superior performance with smaller number of parameters and its usage can be extended to other medical application domains.