A Bio-inspired Foveated Convolutional Neural Network with Grad-CAM Explainability for Kidney Disease Classification in CT Imaging
摘要
An accurate and interpreountrytable classification of kidney CT images is essential for the early diagnosis of renal diseases such as cysts, stones, and tumours, as a delayed or unreliable interpretation can lead to severe clinical complications. However, most existing deep learning models rely on single-scale feature extraction and offer limited explainability, thus limiting their clinical applicability. To address these limitations, this study proposes EagleVisionNet. This biologically inspired dual-path convolutional neural network explicitly models peripheral and foveal vision mechanisms to enable structured multi-scale feature learning. The peripheral pathway captures the global anatomical context, while the foveal pathway focuses on high-resolution localised pathological details. The model was trained and evaluated on a dataset of 12,446 CT images collected from multiple hospitals in Dhaka, Bangladesh, comprising four classes: Normal, Cyst, Stone and Tumor. Experimental results demonstrate an overall classification accuracy of 94%, with macro-averaged precision, recall, and F1-score of 0.93. Visual explanations based on Grad-CAM confirm that the proposed model consistently attends to clinically relevant kidney regions, thus enhancing interpretability and diagnostic trust. Multi-class ROC and Precision–Recall analyses further validate the robustness of the framework, particularly for imbalanced stone cases. These findings highlight the effectiveness of bio-inspired multi-scale architectures combined with explainable AI for developing reliable and clinically meaningful automated kidney disease diagnostic systems.