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.