PAD-Net: Towards Intelligent Diagnosis of Peripheral Artery Disease with a Deep Learning Framework

Abstract

Peripheral Artery Disease (PAD) is a serious and potentially limb and life-threatening condition that demands a timely and accurate diagnosis to prevent severe complications. Traditional diagnostic methods are often slow and error prone. Although PAD localization remains relatively less explored using machine learning, the development of efficient and deployable models for real-time arterial blockage identification demands more investigation. In this paper, we propose PAD-Net, a novel end-to-end object detection framework specifically optimized for the identification and localization of arterial blockage. By integrating Light-Weight Feature Adapter (LFA) and Transformer block into You Only Look Once (YOLO) architecture, our model enhances the possibility of capturing multi-scale vascular structures often obscured in complex medical backgrounds/conditions. The proposed model was evaluated on a novel dataset of lower-extremity CT angiograms collected from the National Institute of Cardiovascular Disease, Bangladesh. Experimental results demonstrate that the model achieves a Mean Average Precision of 0.87 (mAP@0.5) and 0.423 (mAP@0.5:0.95), achieving competitive performance compared with state-of-theart YOLO and RT-DETR (Real Time Detection Transformer) models. At the same time, it maintains real-time speed to make predictions. The proposed PAD-Net gives a strong and scalable solution for AI-based PAD diagnosis. Furthermore, to validate real-world applicability, the model is deployed on a web-based Streamlit Community Cloud. The deployment of the proposed model highlights the effectiveness of reliable PAD detection and its integration into clinical workflows.