Fig. 3: Ablation analysis of key architectural components demonstrating individual contributions to overall framework performance.

a Effect of removing cross-modal attention mechanism, showing 2–3% AUROC diagnostic decline and 1–2% F1 subtyping decline. b Contribution of the gated Product-of-Experts (PoE) fusion module, demonstrating that replacing it with concatenation causes 4–6% AUROC diagnostic decline and 3–5% F1 subtyping decline, with ¿15% performance collapse under imaging-missing scenarios. c Impact of modality dropout on robustness under incomplete data, showing 5–8% AUROC decline when modality dropout is removed, demonstrating its critical role in training-time robustness. d Influence of consistency regularization on cross-modal alignment (78% vs 52% spatial correspondence with/without regularization) and interpretability, with modest 1% AUROC decline when removed but substantial loss of radiology-pathology correspondence clarity.