AppendiGrade: An XAI-Enhanced Deep Learning Framework for Grading Appendicitis in Ultrasound with Gaussian Blur and Grad-CAM

2026-08-18

AI Summary

研究开发了一种基于深度学习的框架，使用预训练模型和图像处理技术来提高超声图像中复杂阑尾炎诊断的准确性，并通过Grad-CAM解释模型预测。

Abstract

Appendicitis is one of the most common abdominal emergencies worldwide and requires prompt diagnosis and treatment to prevent life-threatening conditions. However, accurately differentiating complicated cases, such as perforation or abscess formation, from uncomplicated appendicitis remains a significant clinical challenge. Among other methods, ultrasound is a safer and more cost-efficient diagnostic technique because of the lack of radiation exposure. In this research, an advanced system capable of automatically detecting complicated appendicitis from ultrasound images was developed. A dataset consisting of 4679 ultrasound images with 5 classes, namely perforated, abscess, acute, appendicolith, and normal, was used for the proposed model training and testing. Four pretrained deep learning models, DenseNet201, InceptionV3, ConvNextTiny, and VGG19, have been employed for detecting and classifying complicated appendicitis. In the initial configuration, InceptionV3 achieved the second highest accuracy, with a value of 69.21%. Owing to suboptimal performance with raw images, further optimization techniques, including image preprocessing, hyperparameter tuning, model fine-tuning, and image sharpening, were applied. These enhancements significantly improved the model's performance, with an accuracy of 95.58% for InceptionV3. The model performance is then explained with gradient-weighted class activation mapping (Grad-CAM), which creates a heatmap of the regions responsible for the model's prediction of the infected areas. This could make crosschecking with experts much easier.

Problem

• Appendicitis
• Ultrasound
• Complicated cases
• Diagnosis
• Deep learning

Innovation

• XAI-Enhanced
• Gaussian Blur
• Grad-CAM
• Deep Learning Models
• Image Preprocessing