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Article History

Received: 3 October 2025

Accepted: 3 March 2026

First Online: 16 March 2026

Declarations

:

: The authors declare no competing interests.

: The study isn’t a clinical trial on drugs, supplements or foods, but a development of a machine learning model for supporting surgeons in the decision of the best treatment for breast cancer patients. The anonymous nature of the predictive model does not allow to trace in any way sensitive personal data. Therefore, the present web-survey study does not require approval by the Ethics Committee. Moreover, we declare, The study was conducted using historical medical records (2009–2015) that were fully anonymized prior to analysis. According to institutional policy and applicable regulations, no formal ethics approval was required for the use of anonymized data as they were acquired before the GDPR - (UE) n. 2016/679. To document this, a self-declaration signed by the Principal Investigator (PI) has been prepared, confirming that the study did not require IRB/EC approval under local regulations. This declaration is provided in the supplementary materials.With regard to anonymization and access control processes, all patient identifiers were removed prior to data integration. Indirect identifiers were also aggregated to prevent re-identification. Data was stored in a secure MySQL database with access restricted to authorized team members through individual credentials and role-based permissions. The GitHub repository referenced in the manuscript contains only scripts and documentation, not raw or sensitive data.