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Mammography imaging remains the gold standard for breast cancer detection and diagnosis, but challenges in image quality can lead to misdiagnosis, increased radiation exposure, and higher healthcare costs. This comprehensive review evaluates traditional and machine learning-based techniques for improving mammography image quality, aiming to benefit clinicians and enhance diagnostic accuracy. Our literature search, spanning 2015 - 2024, identified 115 articles focusing on contrast enhancement and noise reduction methods, including histogram equalization, filtering, unsharp masking, fuzzy logic, transform-based techniques, and advanced machine learning approaches. Machine learning, particularly architectures integrating denoising autoencoders with convolutional neural networks, emerged as highly effective in enhancing image quality without compromising detail. The discussion highlights the success of these techniques in improving mammography images' visual quality. However, challenges such as high noise ratios, inconsistent evaluation metrics, and limited open-source datasets persist. Addressing these issues offers opportunities for future research to further advance mammography image enhancement methodologies.

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Dealing with missing data is a crucial step in the preprocessing stage of most data mining projects. Especially in healthcare contexts, addressing this issue is fundamental, since it may result in keeping or loosing critical patient information that can help physicians in their daily clinical practice. Over the years, many researchers have addressed this problem, basing their approach on the implementation of a set of imputation techniques and evaluating their performance in classification tasks. These classic approaches, however, do not consider some intrinsic data information that could be related to the performance of those algorithms, such as features’ distribution. Establishing a correspondence between data distribution and the most proper imputation method avoids the need of repeatedly testing a large set of methods, since it provides a heuristic on the best choice for each feature in the study. The goal of this work is to understand the relationship between data distribution and the performance of well-known imputation techniques, such as Mean, Decision Trees, k-Nearest Neighbours, Self-Organizing Maps and Support Vector Machines imputation. Several publicly available datasets, all complete, were selected attending to several characteristics such as number of distributions, features and instances. Missing values were artificially generated at different percentages and the imputation methods were evaluated in terms of Predictive and Distributional Accuracy. Our findings show that there is a relationship between features’ distribution and algorithms’ performance, although some factors must be taken into account, such as the number of features per distribution and the missing rate at state.

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Machine learning algorithms have evolved by exchanging simplicity and interpretability for accuracy, which prevents their adoption in critical tasks such as healthcare. Progress can be made by improving interpretability of complex models while preserving performance. This work introduces an extension of interpretable mimic learning which teaches in-terpretable models to mimic predictions of complex deep neural networks, not only on binary problems but also in ordinal settings. The results show that the mimic models have comparative performance to Deep Neural Network models, with the advantage of being interpretable.

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