An accurate and interpretable model for BCCT.core

Breast Cancer Conservative Treatment (BCCT) is considered nowadays to be the most widespread form of locor-regional breast cancer treatment. However, aesthetic results are heterogeneous and difficult to evaluate in a standardized way. The limited reproducibility of subjective aesthetic evaluation in BCCT motivated the research towards objective methods. A recent computer system (BCCT.core) was developed to objectively and automatically evaluate the aesthetic result of BCCT. The system is centered on a support vector machine (SVM) classifier with a radial basis function (RBF) used to predict the overall cosmetic result from features computed on a digital photograph of the patient. However, this classifier is not ideal for the interpretation of the factors being used in the prediction. Therefore, an often suggested improvement is the interpretability of the model being used to assess the overall aesthetic result. In the current work we investigate the accuracy of different interpretable methods against the model currently deployed in the BCCT.core software. We compare the performance of decision trees and linear classifiers with the RBF SVM currently in BCCT.core. In the experimental study, these interpretable models shown a similar accuracy to the currently used RBF SVM, suggesting that the later can be replaced without sacrificing the performance of the BCCT.core.