# CortiNet: A Physics-Perception Hybrid Cortical-Inspired Dual-Stream Network for Gallbladder Disease Diagnosis from Ultrasound

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01000 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01000/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [A Survey on Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Towards Medical XAI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07374/) (2019)
- [Explainable deep learning models in medical image analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13799/) (2020)
- [Surpassing the Human Accuracy: Detecting Gallbladder Cancer from USG Images with Curriculum Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11433/) (2022)
- [RadFormer: Transformers with Global-Local Attention for Interpretable and Accurate Gallbladder Cancer Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04793/) (2022)
- [Medical Deep Learning -- A systematic Meta-Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14881/) (2020)
- [Self-Supervised Multi-Modality Learning for Multi-Label Skin Lesion Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18583/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [TrustFed: Enabling Trustworthy Medical AI under Data Privacy Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21656/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Ultrasound imaging is the primary diagnostic modality for detecting Gallbladder diseases due to its non-invasive nature, affordability, and wide accessibility. However, the low resolution and speckle noise inherent to ultrasound images hinder diagnostic reliability, prompting the use of large convolutional neural networks that are difficult to deploy in routine clinical settings. In this work, we propose CortiNet, a lightweight, cortical-inspired dual-stream neural architecture for gallbladder disease diagnosis that integrates physically interpretable multi-scale signal decomposition with perception-driven feature learning. Inspired by parallel processing pathways in the human visual cortex, CortiNet explicitly separates low-frequency structural information from high-frequency perceptual details and processes them through specialized encoding streams. By operating directly on structured, frequency-selective representations rather than raw pixel intensities, the architecture embeds strong physics-based inductive bias, enabling efficient feature learning with a significantly reduced parameter footprint. A late-stage cortical-style fusion mechanism integrates complementary structural and textural cues while preserving computational efficiency. Additionally, we propose a structure-aware explainability framework wherein gradient-weighted class activation mapping is only applied to the structural branch of the proposed CortiNet architecture. This choice allows the model to only focus on the structural features, making it robust against speckle noise. We evaluate CortiNet on 10,692 expert-annotated images spanning nine clinically relevant gallbladder disease categories. Experimental results demonstrate that CortiNet achieves high diagnostic accuracy (98.74%) with only a fraction of the parameters required by conventional deep convolutional models.