Title
Recent Advances in Breast Cancer Detection and Diagnosis: A Comprehensive Survey of Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Explainable AI Approaches
Authors
V.Niranjana, P.Kanimozhi, T.Ananth Kumar
Abstract
The early and precise diagnosis of breast cancer is one of the most important factors in enhancing survival rates. Despite considerable improvements in screening methods, medical imaging, and treatment approaches, the issue of reliable early detection remains a significant problem due to instability in clinical interpretation and the complexity of diagnostic information. Conventional methods of diagnosis emphasize the analysis of clinical and histopathological information, which are prone to inter-observer error and do not necessarily reveal subtle patterns related to disease progression. Artificial Intelligence has demonstrated enormous potential in alleviating these weaknesses. Ensemble methods, as well as support vector machines and gradient boosting-based algorithms such as XGBoost and LightGBM, have shown excellent results in the analysis of structured clinical data. Simultaneously, deep learning (DL) systems, specifically convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have been demonstrated to be exceptionally successful in medical image analysis such as mammography and histopathology. However, the interpretability of such models remains a major obstacle to their usage in clinical practice. To address this problem, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods, including SHAP, LIME, and Grad-CAM, have been proposed to improve model transparency and contribute significantly to understanding how decisions are made. This paper reviews recent developments in ML, DL, and XAI in relation to breast cancer diagnosis. It examines commonly used datasets, evaluation metrics, and trends, and also reports the most significant issues, including data constraints, lack of interpretability, and challenges in multimodal integration. Moreover, this paper identifies knowledge gaps in existing research and highlights the necessity of developing robust, explainable, and actionable AI-based diagnostic systems.
Keywords
Breast Cancer; Machine Learning; Deep Learning; Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI); Medical Imaging
Full Text
References
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