The use of Decision Tree in Breast Cancer-Related Research: a Scoping Analysis Based on Scopus-Indexed Articles

Breast cancer is the leading cancer that occurs in women globally. The use of machine learning has been introduced to supplement the work in breast cancer studies. There are undisputed pieces of evidence of the existence of publications pertaining to the use of decision tree in breast cancer-related research. However, little is known regarding the types and frequencies of the searched articles. The main objective of this paper is to unearth the broad variety of articles related to breast cancer research that utilized decision trees. The Scopus database was chosen to examine the trend, frequencies and themes of the related publications from the year 2013 until 2018. The study was also intended to disclose the categories of articles based on the areas of breast cancer that have employed the decision trees method. A total of 259 articles from Scopus database were found to meet the inclusion criteria. The analysis of the frequency of published articles generally shows an upward trend. The majority of articles targeted diagnosis of breast cancer (37.8%) in comparisons with other categories. Even though the number of articles found is adequate, several categories of breast cancer are lacking in publications specifically the survivability, incidence, and recurrence of breast cancer among patients. There is a need to redirect the focus of breast cancer research on these categories for future efforts