Explainable Lightweight Model Using Low-Rank and Convolutional Block Attention for Pancreatic Cancer Diagnosis.

[BACKGROUND] Early and accurate pancreatic cancer (PC) detection remains a major clinical challenge.

[METHODS] We introduce a novel hybrid deep learning framework for automated classification of CT images, which requires fewer computational resources while achieving high diagnostic performance. We integrated a lightweight MobileNetV3Small backbone with a convolutional block attention module and Low-rank Attention with Shared Efficient Representations (LASER) to enhance feature representation. Feature maps are projected via a 1 × 1 convolution into token sequences and processed through a transformer encoder to capture long-range dependencies. A parallel global average pooling extracts aggregated features, fused using a cross-type interaction (CTI) module.

[RESULTS] The model was evaluated on 18,942 CT images and achieved 99.34% accuracy, AUC-ROC of 0.9996, Cohen's Kappa of 0.9897, and MCC of 0.9859, outperforming ResNet50, EfficientNetB0, and ViT variants with only 1.26 million parameters.

[CONCLUSIONS] Explainability analyses using Grad-CAM, Grad-CAM++, and attention visualisation suggest that the model focuses on clinically relevant regions.