Breast cancer diagnosis has greatly benefited from the use of deep learning (DL) and machine learning (ML) methods on multimodal data, including mammography, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), ultrasound, histopathology, genomic data, and clinical reports. Every modality presents its challenges and opportunities, demanding a thorough understanding of used methods for accurate and early diagnosis. Our review provides an exhaustive survey of the latest advances in DL and ML applications to detect, classify, and segment breast cancer in these modalities. Our work also addresses basic issues of data limitations, model generalizability, and interpretability. To overcome these issues we explore the state-of-the-art Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as an emerging approach for multimodal learning. Through incorporation of the current advances and identification of areas of future improvement, this review is a precious source of information to researchers and practitioners. The findings highlight the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration, application of standardized data sets, and continuous improvement of the methodology to facilitate clinical uptake of AI-based breast cancer diagnostic systems.

Mammography is the main method for early detection of breast cancer, which is still a major global health concern. However, inter-reader variability and the inherent difficulty of interpreting subtle radiographic features frequently limit the accuracy of diagnosis. A thorough assessment of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for automated mammogram classification is presented in this work, along with the introduction of two innovative multi-view integration techniques: Dual-Branch Ensemble (DBE) and Merged Dual-View (MDV). By setting aside two datasets for out-of-sample testing, we evaluate the generalizability of the model using six different mammography datasets that represent various populations and imaging systems. We compare a number of cutting-edge architectures on both individual and combined datasets, including ResNet, DenseNet, EfficientNet, MobileNet, Vision Transformers, and VGG19. Both MDV and DBE strategies improve classification performance, according to experimental results. VGG19 and DenseNet both obtained high ROC AUC scores of 0.9051 and 0.7960 under the MDV approach. DenseNet demonstrated strong performance in the DBE setting, achieving a ROC AUC of 0.8033, while ResNet50 recorded a ROC AUC of 0.8042. These enhancements demonstrate how beneficial multi-view fusion is for boosting model robustness. The impact of domain shift is further highlighted by generalization tests, which emphasize the need for diverse datasets in training. These results offer practical advice for improving CNN architectures and integration tactics, which will aid in the creation of trustworthy, broadly applicable AI-assisted breast cancer screening tools.

Early detection of breast cancer via mammography enhances patient survival rates, prompting this study to assess object detection models—Cascade R-CNN, YOLOv12 (S, L, and X variants), RTMDet-X, and RT-DETR-X—for detecting masses and calcifications across four public datasets (INbreast, CBIS-DDSM, VinDr-Mammo, and EMBED). The evaluation employs a standardized preprocessing approach (CLAHE, cropping) and augmentation (rotations, scaling), with transfer learning tested by training on combined datasets (e.g., INbreast + CBIS-DDSM) and validating on held-out sets (e.g., VinDr-Mammo). Performance is measured using precision, recall, mean Average Precision at IoU 0.5 (${\mathrm{mAP}}_{50}$), and F1-score. YOLOv12-L excels in mass detection with an ${\mathrm{mAP}}_{50}$ of 0.963 and F1-score up to 0.917 on INbreast, while RTMDet-X achieves an ${\mathrm{mAP}}_{50}$ of 0.697 on combined datasets with transfer learning. Preprocessing improves ${\mathrm{mAP}}_{50}$ by up to 0.209, and transfer learning elevates INbreast performance to an ${\mathrm{mAP}}_{50}$ of 0.995, though it incurs 5–11% drops on CBIS-DDSM (0.566 to 0.447) and VinDr-Mammo (0.59 to 0.5) due to domain shifts. EMBED yields a low ${\mathrm{mAP}}_{50}$ of 0.306 due to label inconsistencies, and calcification detection remains weak (${\mathrm{mAP}}_{50}$ < 0.116), highlighting the value of high-capacity models, preprocessing, and augmentation for mass detection while identifying calcification detection and domain adaptation as key areas for future investigation.

Breast cancer is still one of the top causes of cancer-related death for women globally, and better patient outcomes depend on early identification. Although mammography is the main imaging modality used for screening, the delicate nature of early clinical symptoms and inter-reader variability sometimes compromise diagnostic accuracy. We examine the application of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to automated classification of mammogram images in this work. FusionView-Net (FV-Net) is also presented, a novel dual-view integration framework that combines data from mediolateral oblique (MLO) and craniocaudal (CC) views to improve diagnostic precision. To produce a more comprehensive depiction of the breast tissue than conventional single-view methods, FV-Net combines contextual and spatial data from both standard perspectives. Two publicly available mammography datasets, which have been properly divided to allow for both seen-unseen data configurations and cross-dataset generalization testing, are used to assess the approach. A variety of CNN architectures are evaluated on separate and combined datasets, including ResNet18 and a specially created CNN. Findings indicate that FV-Net significantly increases model robustness and classification accuracy, as evidenced by consistently better F1 scores and ROC AUC values, especially when combined with ResNet18 and the custom CNN. The necessity for flexible models in actual clinical settings is shown by generalization studies, which further highlight the significance of dataset diversity by showing a noticeable drop in performance when domain shifts are present. Our results demonstrate how well multi-view fusion works for CNN-based mammography classification and provide useful guidance for choosing architectures and training methods. The development of trustworthy, broadly applicable AI technologies to assist radiologists in the early diagnosis of breast cancer is made possible by FV-Net.