A Hybrid Fully Convolutional CNN-Transformer Model for Inherently Interpretable Medical Image Classification

Abstract: In many medical imaging tasks, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) efficiently extract local features hierarchically. More recently, vision transformers (ViTs) have gained popularity, using self-attention mechanisms to capture global dependencies, but lacking the inherent spatial localization of convolutions. Therefore, hybrid models combining CNNs and ViTs have been developed to combine the strengths of both architectures. However, such hybrid CNN-ViT models are difficult to interpret, which hinders their application in medical imaging. In this work, we introduce an interpretable-by-design hybrid fully convolutional CNN-Transformer architecture for medical image classification. Unlike widely used post-hoc saliency methods for ViTs, our approach generates faithful and localized evidence maps that directly reflect the model's decision process. We evaluated our method on two medical image classification tasks using color fundus images. Our model not only achieves state-of-the-art predictive performance compared to both black-box and interpretable models but also provides class-specific sparse evidence maps in a single forward pass. The code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Expl-CNN-Transformer/.