AccScience Publishing / AIH / Online First / DOI: 10.36922/AIH026260072
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ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE

DualPath-CRC: Adaptive Swin Transformer blocks and Attention-Augmented InceptionNeXt for classification of colorectal cancer histopathology

Uddagiri Sirisha1* Appalaraju Grandhi2 Panguluri Padmavathi3 Jyothi Desireddy4 Kannaiah Chattu5
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1 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Prasad V. Potluri Siddhartha Institute of Technology, Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, India
2 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, School of Computing, Aditya University, Kakinada, Andhra Pradesh, India
3 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Koneru Lakshmaiah Education Foundation, Guntur, Andhra Pradesh, India
4 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Lakireddy Bali Reddy College of Engineering, Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, India
5 Department of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, School of Computer Science and Engineering, VIT-AP University, Amaravati, Andhra Pradesh, India
Received: 27 June 2026 | Revised: 25 July 2026 | Accepted: 3 August 2026 | Published online: 18 August 2026
© 2026 by the Author(s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )
Abstract

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third most common cancer and the second leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide, with about 1.85 million cases and 850,000 deaths annually. While a definitive diagnosis depends on the histopathological examination of hematoxylin and eosin-stained tissue slides, considerable variability remains in slide interpretation among pathologists, and manual examination is time-consuming. These limitations have led to the development of computer-aided methods for analyzing colorectal histopathology slides. Recent hybrid Transformer models often lack adaptive channel re-weighting, use fixed window sizes that may restrict the multi-scale receptive field, or rely on traditional feature-fusion techniques that assume simple element-wise addition. To overcome these shortcomings, DualPath-CRC proposes three architectural innovations: (i) Attention-Augmented InceptionNeXt blocks, which apply sigmoid-based channel attention to multi-branch depthwise convolutions; (ii) Adaptive Window Swin Transformer blocks, in which a Window-Size Prediction Network adaptively controls the receptive field of self-attention; and (iii) a Gated Cross-Pathway Fusion module, which fuses the local and global feature streams through learned sigmoid gating. For the classification of histological tissue patches, DualPath-CRC achieves an accuracy of 99.98% on NCT-CRC-HE-100K and 99.34% on Kather-5K. The regions highlighted by Grad-CAM, Grad-CAM++, and LIME analyses provide qualitative information about which parts of the image are important for the model’s predictions and typically correspond to morphologically relevant tissue areas.

Graphical abstract
Keywords
Colorectal cancer
Histopathology
Hybrid deep learning
Squeeze-and-excitation attention
Adaptive Swin Transformer
Gated feature fusion
Medical image classification
Grad-CAM
Funding
This research received no external funding. The authors did not receive any financial support, grants, or other funding from public, commercial, or not-for-profit organizations for the conduct of this research or for the publication of this article.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
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Artificial Intelligence in Health, Electronic ISSN: 3029-2387 Print ISSN: 3041-0894, Published by AccScience Publishing