Efficient Axillary Lymph Node Detection Via Two-stage Spatial-information-fusion-based CNN

•An advanced detection neural network, the improved Faster R-CNN, is presented to realize the localization and classification of axillary lymph nodes (ALNs) simultaneously, which not only classifies lymph node metastasis, but also provides doctors with the position of ALNs in the image for reference.•As ALN usually appears on the left and right sides of CECT images, an attention model, which has the ability of extracting spatial information, was added into the network, aiming to further improve the performance of the algorithm in positioning ALN.•A novel model constructed by channel fusion and bottle neck architecture is proposed and placed before the flatten operation to better fuse and transmit spatial information with less computational cost.