Breast cancer is one of the most common invading cancers in women. Analyzing breast cancer is nontrivial and may lead to disagreements among experts. Although deep learning methods achieved an excellent performance in classification tasks including breast cancer histopathological images, the existing state-of-the-art methods are computationally expensive and may overfit due to extracting features from in-distribution images. In this paper, our contribution is mainly twofold. First, we perform a short survey on deep-learning-based models for classifying histopathological images to investigate the most popular and optimized training-testing ratios. Our findings reveal that the most popular training-testing ratio for histopathological image classification is 70%: 30%, whereas the best performance (e.g., accuracy) is achieved by using the training-testing ratio of 80%: 20% on an identical dataset. Second, we propose a method named DenTnet to classify breast cancer histopathological images chiefly. DenTnet utilizes the principle of transfer learning to solve the problem of extracting features from the same distribution using DenseNet as a backbone model. The proposed DenTnet method is shown to be superior in comparison to a number of leading deep learning methods in terms of detection accuracy (up to 99.28% on BreaKHis dataset deeming training-testing ratio of 80%: 20%) with good generalization ability and computational speed. The limitation of existing methods including the requirement of high computation and utilization of the same feature distribution is mitigated by dint of the DenTnet.

Breast cancer is one of the most prevalent and life-threatening diseases affecting women worldwide. Early and accurate diagnosis is critical for effective treatment and improved patient outcomes. While histopathological image analysis plays a key role in breast cancer diagnosis, the complexity and heterogeneity of these images present significant challenges. To address this, we propose DenseNet-FPA, a novel method that combines Dense Convolutional Networks (DenseNet) with the Flower Pollination Algorithm (FPA) to enhance feature selection and classification in breast cancer histopathology images. DenseNet effectively extracts hierarchical features, while FPA optimizes the selection of the most discriminative features, improving classification accuracy and reducing computational overhead. We evaluated our approach on two publicly available datasets, i.e. BreakHis and BACH, achieving accuracies of 99.32% and 96%, respectively. These results significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods, which achieved <99% on BreakHis and <93% on BACH. Our findings demonstrate significant improvements in binary classification performance, offering a more efficient and accurate approach for breast cancer diagnosis. The proposed method has potential applications in other histopathological analyses and clinical settings.

The demand for advanced detection methods and accurate staging remains a global challenge in cancer diagnosis. Even though traditional deep learning models in medical imaging achieve high precision, they suffer from limited explainability and multimodal reasoning due to their black-box nature, thereby limiting their clinical applicability. To address this gap, recent research has increasingly explored multimodal approaches that integrate visual and textual clinical data to enhance diagnostic accuracy and interpretability. This study presents a bibliometric analysis of 408 publications from 2021 to 2025, collected from Web of Science and Scopus, using VOSviewer and R-Bibliometrix to map citation networks, co-authorship, and keyword co-occurrences. The results reveal a rapid growth from 1 publication in 2021 to 269 in 2025, with significant contributions from leading countries and institutions. Thematic analysis indicates a shift from conventional convolutional approaches toward transformer-based and self-supervised methods, alongside increasing attention to multimodal learning in cancer imaging tasks such as breast, lung, and brain cancer analysis. Overall, this study provides a structured overview of the evolving research landscape, highlighting key trends, emerging themes, and research gaps to inform future developments in multimodal artificial intelligence for cancer diagnosis.