LukeNet: A lightweight CNN integrated with an XAI model for Smart acute lymphoblastic leukemia detection and management

Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) patients require early, accurate detection to enable timely treatment and effective patient management. A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is well-suited for creating an end-to-end enabling environment for ALL detection and classification. However, most CNN-based ALL detection systems are theoretical and unsuitable for deployment on edge devices due to high computational demands. The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)-enabled devices offer an opportunity to monitor ALL patients in real time. Wearables that track temperature, heart rate, oxygen saturation, and activity can deliver critical data to support timely clinical intervention and improve patient outcomes. In smart IoMT environments, a lightweight CNN is essential because connected devices often operate under limited computational power, memory, and latency constraints. To address this need, this study proposes LukeNet, a lightweight CNN integrated with explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) for an IoMT-based SMART Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Detection and Management System. Trained on three (3) ALL datasets and five-fold cross-validation, LukeNet achieved an impressive 99% model accuracy as well as 99% unseen test accuracy, which is higher than six state-of-the-art (SOTA) CNNs, such as DenseNet121, MobileNet, ResNet50, InceptionV3, Xception, and VGG16, as well as transfer learning models. Furthermore, LukeNet was compared with two ensemble models. In addition, explainable AI methods are integrated to highlight relevant regions in microscopic images. The novelty of this study lies in the architecture of LukeNet, which balances model depth and computational efficiency by using depthwise separable convolutions, mitigates the risk of gradient loss in deeper layers, and provides strong global and local feature extraction capabilities.