Enhancing Breast Cancer Diagnosis in Mammography: Evaluation and Integration of Convolutional Neural Networks and Explainable AI

The Deep learning (DL) models for diagnosing breast cancer from mammographic images often operate as "black boxes," making it difficult for healthcare professionals to trust and understand their decision-making processes. The study presents an integrated framework combining Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) for the enhanced diagnosis of breast cancer using the CBIS-DDSM dataset. The methodology encompasses an elaborate data preprocessing pipeline and advanced data augmentation techniques to counteract dataset limitations and transfer learning using pre-trained networks such as VGG-16, Inception-V3 and ResNet was employed. A focal point of our study is the evaluation of XAI’s effectiveness in interpreting model predictions, highlighted by utilising the Hausdorff measure to assess the alignment between AI-generated explanations and expert annotations quantitatively. This approach is critical for XAI in promoting trustworthiness and ethical fairness in AI-assisted diagnostics.