Survival analysis is central to clinical decision-making, yet reliable time-to-event models require large, diverse cohorts that are rarely available at a single institution, while privacy regulations restrict the centralization of patient data. Federated learning (FL) offers a privacy-preserving alternative by training shared models without exchanging raw data, but its effectiveness for survival modeling under realistic, heterogeneous conditions remains insufficiently understood. This paper presents a systematic, multi-model evaluation of federated survival analysis on a cross-institutional breast cancer cohort with naturally heterogeneous distributed clients. Three representative survival models, the Cox Proportional Hazards model, DeepSurv, and Random Survival Forest (RSF), are compared across centralized, local, and federated training, and three federated optimization strategies (FedAvg, FedProx, and FedAdam) are assessed for the gradient-based models. Results show that FL consistently outperforms local training and approaches, and occasionally exceeds, centralized performance, while RSF offers the best overall balance of discrimination, calibration, and robustness across heterogeneous clients. We further find that performance depends on the diversity of client distributions, and that FedAvg and FedProx are stronger and more stable than FedAdam. Based on these findings, we derive practical, decision-oriented guidelines mapping data, privacy, interpretability, and resource constraints to recommended model and training-paradigm choices for federated survival modeling in healthcare.

Breast cancer remains a leading cause of death among women, with early de(NCCT) tection significantly scans of the impro chest, ving routinely prognosis.

M-SYNTH is organized into a directory structure that indicates the parameters. Code and dataset is released with the Creative Commons 1.0 Universal License We now review the timing required to perform mass insertion and imaging. In Table 2, we review the imaging time required for each breast density. The time varies from 2.84 GPU), we were able to generate the complete dataset in about two weeks.Breast Density Time (min) Fatty 13.463809 Scattered 11.002291 Hetero 3.655613 Dense 2.842028 Table 2: Timing analysis for imaging by breast density. Additional renderings of the breast phantoms generated for the study are shown in Figure 1, demonstrating a high level of detail and anatomical variability within and among models.

People who are screened for breast cancer by AI-supported radiologists are less likely to develop aggressive cancers before their next screening round than those who are screened by radiologists alone, raising hopes that AI-assisted screening could save lives. "This is the first randomised controlled trial on the use of AI in mammography screening," says Kristina Lång at Lund University in Sweden. The AI-supported approach involves using the software - which has been trained on more than 200,000 mammography scans from 10 countries - to rank the likelihood of cancer being present in mammograms on a scale of 1 to 10, based on visual patterns in the scans. The scans receiving a score of 1 to 9 are then assessed by one experienced radiologist, while scans receiving a score of 10 - indicating cancer is most likely to be present - are assessed by two experienced radiologists. An earlier study found that this approach could detect 29 per cent more cancers than standard screening, where each mammogram is assessed by two radiologists, without increasing the rate of false detections - where a growth is flagged but follow-up tests reveal it isn't actually there or wouldn't go on to cause problems.

To generate evidence regarding the safety and efficacy of artificial intelligence (AI) enabled medical devices, AI models need to be evaluated on a diverse population of patient cases, some of which may not be readily available. We propose an evaluation approach for testing medical imaging AI models that relies on in silico imaging pipelines in which stochastic digital models of human anatomy (in object space) with and without pathology are imaged using a digital replica imaging acquisition system to generate realistic synthetic image datasets. Here, we release M-SYNTH, a dataset of cohorts with four breast fibroglandular density distributions imaged at different exposure levels using Monte Carlo x-ray simulations with the publicly available Virtual Imaging Clinical Trial for Regulatory Evaluation (VICTRE) toolkit. We utilize the synthetic dataset to analyze AI model performance and find that model performance decreases with increasing breast density and increases with higher mass density, as expected. As exposure levels decrease, AI model performance drops with the highest performance achieved at exposure levels lower than the nominal recommended dose for the breast type.

Risk-based breast cancer screening matches individual genetics to mammogram frequency, showing safety compared to annual screening in a 28,000-woman study.

This study presents a validation and extension of a recent methodological framework for medical image classification. While an improved ConvNeXt Tiny architecture, integrating Global Average and Max Pooling fusion (GAGM), lightweight channel attention (SEVector), and Feature Smoothing Loss (FSL), demonstrated promising results on Alzheimer MRI under CPU friendly conditions, our work investigates its transposability to mammography classification. Using a Kaggle dataset that consolidates INbreast, MIAS, and DDSM mammography collections, we compare a baseline CNN, ConvNeXt Tiny, and InceptionV3 backbones enriched with GAGM and SEVector modules. Results confirm the effectiveness of GAGM and SEVector in enhancing feature discriminability and reducing false negatives, particularly for malignant cases. In our experiments, however, the Feature Smoothing Loss did not yield measurable improvements under mammography classification conditions, suggesting that its effectiveness may depend on specific architectural and computational assumptions. Beyond validation, our contribution extends the original framework through multi metric evaluation (macro F1, per class recall variance, ROC/AUC), feature interpretability analysis (Grad CAM), and the development of an interactive dashboard for clinical exploration. As a perspective, we highlight the need to explore alternative approaches to improve intra class compactness and inter class separability, with the specific goal of enhancing the distinction between malignant and benign cases in mammography classification.

The ChemoTimelines shared task benchmarks methods for constructing timelines of systemic anticancer treatment from electronic health records of cancer patients. This paper describes our methods, results, and findings for subtask 2 -- generating patient chemotherapy timelines from raw clinical notes. We evaluated strategies involving chain-of-thought thinking, supervised fine-tuning, direct preference optimization, and dictionary-based lookup to improve timeline extraction. All of our approaches followed a two-step workflow, wherein an LLM first extracted chemotherapy events from individual clinical notes, and then an algorithm normalized and aggregated events into patient-level timelines. Each specific method differed in how the associated LLM was utilized and trained. Multiple approaches yielded competitive performances on the test set leaderboard, with fine-tuned Qwen3-14B achieving the best official score of 0.678. Our results and analyses could provide useful insights for future attempts on this task as well as the design of similar tasks.

Quantum machine learning has emerged as a promising approach to improve feature extraction and classification tasks in high-dimensional data domains such as medical imaging. In this work, we present a hybrid Quantum-Classical Convolutional Neural Network (QCNN) architecture designed for the binary classification of the BreastMNIST dataset, a standardized benchmark for distinguishing between benign and malignant breast tumors. Our architecture integrates classical convolutional feature extraction with two distinct quantum circuits: an amplitude-encoding variational quantum circuit (VQC) and an angle-encoding VQC circuit with circular entanglement, both implemented on four qubits. These circuits generate quantum feature embeddings that are fused with classical features to form a joint feature space, which is subsequently processed by a fully connected classifier. To ensure fairness, the hybrid QCNN is parameter-matched against a baseline classical CNN, allowing us to isolate the contribution of quantum layers. Both models are trained under identical conditions using the Adam optimizer and binary cross-entropy loss. Experimental evaluation in five independent runs demonstrates that the hybrid QCNN achieves statistically significant improvements in classification accuracy compared to the classical CNN, as validated by a one-sided Wilcoxon signed rank test (p = 0.03125) and supported by large effect size of Cohen's d = 2.14. Our results indicate that hybrid QCNN architectures can leverage entanglement and quantum feature fusion to enhance medical image classification tasks. This work establishes a statistical validation framework for assessing hybrid quantum models in biomedical applications and highlights pathways for scaling to larger datasets and deployment on near-term quantum hardware.

Early cancer detection remains one of the most critical challenges in modern healthcare, where delayed diagnosis significantly reduces survival outcomes. Recent advancements in artificial intelligence, particularly deep learning, have enabled transformative progress in medical imaging analysis. Deep learning-based computer vision models, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs), transformers, and hybrid attention architectures, can automatically extract complex spatial, morphological, and temporal patterns from multimodal imaging data including MRI, CT, PET, mammography, histopathology, and ultrasound. These models surpass traditional radiological assessment by identifying subtle tissue abnormalities and tumor microenvironment variations invisible to the human eye. At a broader scale, the integration of multimodal imaging with radiogenomics linking quantitative imaging features with genomics, transcriptomics, and epigenetic biomarkers has introduced a new paradigm for personalized oncology. This radiogenomic fusion allows the prediction of tumor genotype, immune response, molecular subtypes, and treatment resistance without invasive biopsies.