Enhancing B-mode-based breast cancer diagnosis via cross-attention fusion of H-scan and Nakagami imaging with multi-CAM-QUS-driven XAI.

OBJECTIVE: B-mode ultrasound is widely employed for breast lesion diagnosis due to its affordability, widespread availability, and effectiveness, particularly in cases of dense breast tissue where mammography may be less sensitive. However, it disregards critical tissue information embedded in raw radiofrequency (RF) data. While both modalities have demonstrated promise in Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD), their combined potential remains largely unexplored. Approach.This paper presents an automated breast lesion classification network that utilizes H-scan and Nakagami parametric images derived from RF ultrasound signals, combined with machine-generated B-mode images, seamlessly integrated through a Multi Modal Cross Attention Fusion (MM-CAF) mechanism to extract complementary information. The proposed architecture also incorporates an attention-guided modified InceptionV3 for feature extraction, a Knowledge-Guided Cross-Modality Learning (KGCML) module for inter‑modal knowledge sharing, and Attention-Driven Context Enhancement (ADCE) modules to improve contextual understanding and fusion with the classification network. The network employs categorical cross-entropy loss, a Multi-CAM-based loss to guide learning toward accurate lesion-specific features, and a Multi-QUS-based loss to embed clinically meaningful domain knowledge and effectively distinguishing between benign and malignant lesions, all while supporting explainable AI (XAI) principles. Main results. Experiments conducted on multi-center breast ultrasound datasets--BUET-BUSD, ATL, and OASBUD--characterized by demographic diversity, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, achieving classification accuracies of 92.54%, 89.93%, and 90.0%, respectively, along with high interpretability and trustworthiness. These results surpass those of existing methods based on B-mode and/or RF data, highlighting the superior performance and robustness of the proposed technique.