<![CDATA[Breast cancer remains one of the leading causes of mortality among women, making accurate and trustworthy early detection a critical challenge in healthcare. To address this, we propose PROTEGO, a Prototype-Contrastive Autoencoder with integrated Conformal Prediction, designed to achieve both high diagnostic accuracy and reliable uncertainty quantification. The framework combines dual-head autoencoding, supervised contrastive learning, prototype-based regularization, and conformal calibration to generate discriminative yet interpretable representations. Using the Wisconsin Diagnostic Breast Cancer (WDBC) dataset, PROTEGO was trained and evaluated through stratified data splits, with performance measured by AUROC, AUPRC, F1-score, Balanced Accuracy, Brier score, calibration error, and conformal coverage metrics. The results show that PROTEGO achieves highly competitive performance with an AUROC of 0.992 and an AUPRC of 0.995, while uniquely providing conformal coverage guarantees with an average set size close to one and more than 92% decisive predictions. Ablation studies confirm the complementary role of each component in enhancing both accuracy and calibration. These findings demonstrate that integrating prototype-guided representation learning with conformal prediction establishes a clinically meaningful diagnostic framework. PROTEGO highlights the importance of unifying precision and reliability in medical AI, offering a step toward more interpretable, safe, and clinically trustworthy systems for breast cancer detection.]]>
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