Demystifying diagnosis: an efficient deep learning technique with explainable AI to improve breast cancer detection

As per a WHO survey conducted in 2023, more than 2.3 million breast cancer (BC) cases are reported every year. In nearly 95% of countries, the second leading cause of death for females is BC. Breast and cervical cancers cause 80% of reported deaths in middle-income countries. Early detection of breast cancer can help patients better manage their condition and increase their chances of survival. However, traditional AI models frequently conceal their decision-making processes and are mainly tailored for classification tasks. Our approach combines composite deep learning techniques with explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) to enhance interpretability and predictive accuracy. By utilizing XAI to examine features and provide insights into its classifications, the model clarifies the rationale behind its decisions, resulting in an understanding of concealed patterns linked to breast cancer detection. The XAI strengthens practitioners’ and health researchers’ confidence and understanding of artificial intelligence (AI)-based models. In this work, we introduce a hybrid deep learning bi-directional long short-term memory-convolutional neural network (BiLSTM-CNN) model to identify breast cancer using patient data effectively. We first balanced the dataset before using the BiLSTM-CNN model. The hybrid deep learning (DL) model presented here performed well in comparison to other studies, with 0.993 accuracy, precision 0.99, recall 0.99, and F1-score 0.99. © 2025 Alzahrani et al.