I upgraded from Ubuntu 16.04 17.04 and then to 17.10. On the company we have a Samsung M337x scanner. Worked fine on 16.04, I didn't test on 17.04 but didn't work on 17.10. After some time I executed:
strace scanimage -L
The result was: the command was unable to find the file /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/sanebsane-smfp.so.1. The reason for that is the package suld-driver2-1.00.36 put all the files under /usr/lib/sane and seems sane on latest available version doesn't look this directory. So my tip is: pu the files on the new folder (which would become the standard) and create some symlnks on old directory.
Thank you. I have updated the driver packages to include symlinks that should resolve this problem.