Bishal Chhetri

Bishal Chhetri, B. V. Rathish Kumar

The dynamics of tumor-immune interactions within a complex tumor microenvironment are typically modeled using a system of ordinary differential equations or partial differential equations. These models introduce some unknown parameters that need to be estimated accurately and efficiently from the limited and noisy experimental data. Moreover, due to the intricate biological complexity and limitations in experimental measurements, tumor-immune dynamics are not fully understood, and therefore, only partial knowledge of the underlying physics may be available, resulting in unknown or missing terms within the system of equations. In this study, we develop a cancer biology-informed neural network model(CBINN) to infer the unknown parameters in the system of equations as well as to discover the missing physics from sparse and noisy measurements. We test the performance of the CBINN model on three distinct nonlinear compartmental tumor-immune models and evaluate its robustness across multiple synthetic noise levels. By harnessing these highly nonlinear dynamics, our CBINN framework effectively estimates the unknown model parameters and uncovers the underlying physical laws or mathematical structures that govern these biological systems, even from scattered and noisy measurements. The models chosen here represent the dynamic patterns commonly observed in compartmental models of tumor-immune interactions, thereby validating the generalizability and efficacy of our methodology.

Bishal Chhetri, B. V. Rathish Kumar

In this study, we present an interpretable deep learning framework for the early detection of breast cancer using quantitative features extracted from digitized fine needle aspirate (FNA) images of breast masses. Our deep neural network, using ReLU activations, the Adam optimizer, and a binary cross-entropy loss, delivers state-of-the-art classification performance, achieving an accuracy of 0.992, precision of 1.000, recall of 0.977, and an F1 score of 0.988. These results substantially exceed the benchmarks reported in the literature. We evaluated the model under identical protocols against a suite of well-established algorithms (logistic regression, decision trees, random forests, stochastic gradient descent, K-nearest neighbors, and XGBoost) and found the deep model consistently superior on the same metrics. Recognizing that high predictive accuracy alone is insufficient for clinical adoption due to the black-box nature of deep learning models, we incorporated model-agnostic Explainable AI techniques such as SHAP and LIME to produce feature-level attributions and human-readable visualizations. These explanations quantify the contribution of each feature to individual predictions, support error analysis, and increase clinician trust, thus bridging the gap between performance and interpretability for real-world clinical use. The concave points feature of the cell nuclei is found to be the most influential feature positively impacting the classification task. This insight can be very helpful in improving the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer by highlighting the key characteristics of breast tumor.