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Lesion-Centric Latent Phenotypes from Segmentation Encoders for Breast Ultrasound Interpretability

Mittal, P.; Singh, D.; Chauhan, J.

2026-03-06 radiology and imaging
10.64898/2026.03.06.26347800 medRxiv
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We propose a lesion-centric phenotype learning pipeline for interpretable breast ultrasound (BUS). Predicted lesion masks are used for mask-weighted pooling of segmentation-encoder latents, producing compact embeddings that suppress background influence; a lightweight calibration step improves cross-dataset consistency. We cluster embeddings to discover latent phenotypes and relate phenotype structure to morphology descriptors (compactness, boundary sharpness). On BUSI and BUS-UCLM with external testing on BUS-BRA, lesion-centric pooling and calibration improve separability and enable strong malignancy probing (AUC 0.982), outperforming radiomics and a standard CNN baseline. A simple rule-gated generator further improves BI-RADS-style descriptor consistency on difficult cases.

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