AOCN: Appendix Object Correction Network Utilizing Relationships Across CT Slices

When analyzing CT images of patients with suspected appendicitis, radiologists need to observe and examine consecutive 2D CT slices. Computer-assisted detection of the appendix in 2D CT slices significantly improve the diagnostic efficiency of radiologists. However, existing 2D medical image object detection methods primarily focus on spatial features within a single CT slice, which overlook spatial relationships between consecutive slices. We propose an Appendix Object Correction Network (AOCN) to refine predictions of universal object detectors. Although AOCN is a 2D network, it effectively leverages spatial relationships across consecutive CT slices. AOCN requires only a few training epochs to improve the accuracy of bounding boxes significantly, which offers advantages such as high scalability, low cost, and reduced training time. It consists of a global case feature learning module for extracting global feature map from the CT case and an object feature relation module for modeling the relationships between objects across slices. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of AOCN in correcting the output bounding boxes of several mainstream object detection networks, with a 6% to 14% improvement in Recall while requiring only a few training epochs.